


Mortal Hazards

by ImpOfPerversity



Series: Navigation-verse [2]
Category: Baroque Cycle - Neal Stephenson, Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-09-29
Updated: 2004-10-27
Packaged: 2018-10-21 07:38:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 38,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10680735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImpOfPerversity/pseuds/ImpOfPerversity





	1. Chapter 1

  
  
"Let me just get the _mechanics_ of the matter straight in my mind," said Jack Shaftoe. He was sitting cross-legged at the other end of Jack Sparrow's bunk, leaning back against the bulkhead, messily eating an orange. Juice gleamed in his beard, and on his lower lip; but he licked it away, blue eyes wide with feigned innocence, before Jack could lunge forward and do so himself. That look, thought Jack, was provocation enough that no other excuse was necessary. He shot Shaftoe an inviting look, but Shaftoe looked back at him coolly, and took another bite of his breakfast.

"Well, Captain," he said, "I heard about you digging up a compass. A _broken_ compass."

"Ah, but it's _not_ broken," said Jack, narrowing his eyes.

"Well," said Shaftoe, dropping the emptied peel beside Jack's bunk, "not being a sailor born and bred, as I b'lieve you've pointed out a time or two, I'm obviously ignorant of any matter concerning navigation, or geography, or the like." He lifted up the compass (which Jack had thought safely hidden away in a locker) for Jack's perusal. "But it seems to me that North ain't over _there_."

The compass needle wavered, as though it had understood and resented Jack Shaftoe's remarks.

"We're not looking for North. Any compass'll tell us North. _I'll_ tell you North," appended Jack, sensing a chance to impress Shaftoe. The _Black Pearl_ was heading north-east, running before a hot, jungle-scented gale that had blown up from nowhere at dawn. Eventually they would have to set a new course, but for now the _Pearl_ 's rigging and canvas sang with pure speed. "North's thataway," said Jack, waving in the general direction of the cabin's door.

Shaftoe's gaze followed Jack's gesturing hand: then returned, disconcertingly bright and mocking, to Jack himself.

"Aye," he said. "But if it doesn't point North, then what's the use of it?"

"This compass, according to the writings of Don Federico Guimaraes -- a Spanish nobleman of ancient family and great learning, so they tell me -- will lead us to an island that no man can find." Jack lowered his voice, flicking a pointed glance at the deck above his head where unseen listeners might lurk. It wasn't that he didn't trust his crew; but there was no point in letting half-formed rumours spawn. "An island where one of those old conquistadors buried all the gold and jewels he'd stolen from the Indians."

Shaftoe made a scornful noise. "What, a hundred years and more, and no one's come along to dig it up 'til now?"

"No one's had the map, and the Codex, 'til now," corrected Jack. "And 'twas I found the compass, by decoding Don Guimaraes' cunning tales."

"Ah yes," said Shaftoe, not looking at all impressed. "The compass. And pray tell, _Captain_ , where does this compass point?"

Shaftoe had set the compass down between them, on Jack's striped, stained blanket. They both looked at it again. The carven ivory case had seen better days, better decades: Jack could make neither head nor tail of the scenes that decorated each face of the box. The needle, now motionless in its glass despite the pitching of the _Black Pearl_ , had wavered round to point directly at Jack Shaftoe.

"That compass, mate," said Jack, using the compass as an excuse to look straight at Shaftoe, "points the way to the Aztec treasure."

"Nah, it's broken," said Jack Shaftoe. "Even I can tell you that, and me an unlettered landlubber. Really, Captain Sparrow, I hadn't taken you for the sort of man to be hooked by tall tales."

Jack reached forward and turned the compass around, so that the needle pointed to himself rather than to Shaftoe. "Why so ready to disbelieve me, Mr Shaftoe?" he said. "You'll have a share of that treasure, when we come to't."

"'Tis a fool's chase," said Shaftoe rather sharply. "A waste of time. Why're we bothering with old stories and mouldy maps, when we might capture one of those Spanish treasure-ships? We're pirates, for God's sake, we should --"

"Have a care, Jack," advised Jack Sparrow. He was no longer smiling. "The last man who told me what we _should_ be doing ended up with his own little kingdom, remember? A _damp_ kingdom, though if you've a mind to be a king ..."

"I remember," said Shaftoe coolly. He'd stopped smiling, too, and Jack was sorry for it; but there was still that heat in his blue eyes. He glanced down at the compass, and then up at Jack again. "See, _Captain_ , it's pointing at me still."

"Maybe it's a sign, Mr Shaftoe," said Jack, holding Shaftoe's gaze and smiling slowly. "A signal of your worth and your ... value."

"Oh, I've value, have I?" said Jack Shaftoe, putting one finger (a mannerism he'd learned from Jack, which pleased Jack inordinately) to his lip like an actor doing Surprise. "What, a mere Vagabond, and a land-lubber to boot? Surely I'm of no consequence, and no worth, save perhaps in some menial --"

Shaftoe's mouth tasted of oranges, and Jack could feel him grinning as he returned the kiss enthusiastically. Jack'd sprawled forward, propping his hands on Shaftoe's knees; now the two of them, still kissing, wrestled and rolled and writhed until Jack was lying between Shaftoe's long legs, draped over him, sliding his hand into Jack Shaftoe's fruit-stained shirt. Shaftoe's cock, promisingly firm, was pressing into Jack's belly, and Jack writhed a little more, just for the friction.

"I'm of value to you, then?" murmured Shaftoe against Jack's mouth, with a slow undulation that aligned their bodies more conveniently than before.

Jack's breath caught, and he rubbed his thumb over Jack's nipple as if he were polishing it. "Aye, Mr Shaftoe," he said softly. "Of considerable value."

"Then I'm your prize -- is that it?" said Jack Shaftoe. It might have sounded more belligerent if Jack's hand hadn't closed around his cock as he began to speak; his eyes lost their focus and he thrust into Jack's hand, head back and eyes closed, smiling.

Jack began to reply, then thought better of it. What to say? That Shaftoe was his own, just as he was Jack Shaftoe's, with no notion of master and servant but just the two of them, equal? That Shaftoe was a free man, as free as Jack himself? That his life would be poorer sans Jack Shaftoe? All true. None of it accurate, or sufficient, or enough to explain what he felt.

Instead he let himself sink into the deliciously base sensations that Shaftoe was evoking -- god, he'd learnt well -- in Jack's willing body. Shaftoe's hand on his prick; Shaftoe's hot mouth biting gently at his throat, so that the smell of oranges rose from Jack's skin too; Shaftoe's other arm holding Jack close, as though he'd no intention of ever letting go.

The compass box was digging into Jack's hip, and he twisted round to dislodge it. That was opportunity enough for Jack Shaftoe, grinning like a lunatick, to roll over onto Jack and press him down (the compass dropping, unremarked by either, to the Moorish rug by the bunk) and hold himself tantalisingly above his captain for a moment. Jack's cock, abruptly devoid of contact or friction, ached; he arched upward, and snaked one arm about Shaftoe's narrow, hard-muscled waist, and pulled him close.

"Jack," said Shaftoe, with simple wonder. He had stopped calling Jack 'Captain', which -- though a title that Jack very much appreciated, in the main -- was, from Jack Shaftoe, as often veiled mockery as not. He was not mocking now: he was grinning at Jack, between soft biting kisses to throat and face, and working Jack's loose shirt away from his shoulders so as to reach the bare skin beneath.

Jack Sparrow sighed, and moaned, and squirmed; but he did not allow himself to be distracted from his goal, which was the unfastening of Shaftoe's breeches and the subsequent sight of his own hand closing around Shaftoe's heavy, hot cock. He tightened his fingers just for the joy of hearing Jack Shaftoe blaspheme.

"So, Jack," he said, "can I be yours this fine morning? Or will you be mine?" Knowing already what he wanted; for wasn't this man his match? Wasn't he strong, and supple, and clever and teasing and ("oh Christ, Jack," said Jack Sparrow, thoughts interrupted by Shaftoe's hand, wet with saliva and sticky with orange juice, curving around his balls) marvellously inventive?

Shaftoe leered down affectionately at him, and ran his busy tongue around the orbit of Jack's eye as though he were tasting the lamp-black. "That depends, doesn't it?"

"And ... and what does it depend upon?" managed Jack Sparrow, writhing as lewdly as he knew how.

Shaftoe's mouth worked its way back down to Jack's throat, from where he looked up from under his black lashes, and said, "You'd have to be gentle with me."

"Why's that?" enquired Jack, cock leaping at the thought of a slow, languorous fuck, and especially at the thought of Shaftoe's inevitable demands for more; more vigour, more haste, more biting and kissing and ...

"Well, Jack," said Shaftoe. Was that a flush of modesty under his tan? Jack Shaftoe could be brought to a blush, it seemed, by the most innocent remark; Jack had been conducting a number of experiments concerning this, but was no closer to a theory. And now Shaftoe was blushing even though Jack'd said nothing. Perhaps his thoughts showed in his eyes, or in his parted lips, or in the way he was grinding his cock against Shaftoe's own?

"I can still feel you," Shaftoe (distinctly more flushed) explained. "From last night."

He winked at Jack, and Jack felt a rush of weakness at the memory of last night. Shaftoe straddling him, one foot braced against the floor, leaning back as Jack held his hips and fucked him hard. Oh merciful Christ; Jack Shaftoe.

He had to swallow before he could speak, and then Shaftoe was biting at his throat again, and Jack was distracted by the need to spread his legs wider and give Shaftoe's wandering fingers free access to every part of him.

"Then you'd best take me: but will you give me as good as you got?" he said at last, breathlessly, and watched Shaftoe's eyes grow darker with lust.

"I'll give you just what you deserve," he said, voice so low and soft that it was a growl: and next moment had retrieved, from -- ha! -- the pocket of his own breeches, the little pot of oil they'd been using.

"Sure of yourself," Jack could not forbear from pointing out.

"Sure of _you_ , Jack Sparrow," said Shaftoe, with a smile that held as much affection as desire. He was kneeling up now, slathering his hand with scented grease, and then oh God sliding in two fingers at once, which sent a ripple of something -- more surprise than discomfort, really -- through every atom of Jack's body. He got his own hand greasy and stroked Shaftoe's yard up, and then down, slow and hard and tight; and Shaftoe groaned, and moved his fingers (three of 'em now), and murmured, "How much do you want?"

"How much've you got?" parried Jack, eyes half-lidded, stroking Shaftoe's prick again and smiling lewdly.

"You sh'll have it all," promised Jack Shaftoe, and drew his fingers free, leaving Jack achingly empty. Then he was hanging above Jack again, staring into Jack's eyes, and Jack felt that he might drown in that blue unfocussing gaze, or burn up with the broad fiery shaft now pressing relentlessly into his vitals, or suffocate rather than stop kissing Shaftoe, whose mouth was as devastatingly demanding as his cock.

And for a while there was nothing else except Jack Shaftoe; no pitching, gale-driven _Black Pearl_ , no crew about their business on deck (or exchanging amused glances at the sounds coming from their captain's cabin), no treasure or map or compass, no history, no destiny, no fame or fortune or ambition: nothing else except Jack Shaftoe.

* * *

By mid-afternoon the gale had mellowed into a stiff breeze, and the _Pearl_ 's black topsails had been unreefed to capture the hot southerly wind. The line of their wake was erased, over and over, by long sweeping rollers from out of the west, and the bowsprit dipped into all but the shallowest of those waves as the ship headed back into the Caribbean.

To the north-east, Jack Shaftoe could see a smudge of green on the horizon; one or other of those little islands that speckled the map. Jack Sparrow would tell him the name of it, if he asked. There was no other land in sight.

Jack was enjoying this fine view because he was lurking in the maintop, invisible from the deck. He wanted (a rare occurrence) to think, and Jack Sparrow's very presence seemed to rob him of the ability to do so. Besides, Sparrow was occupied with his captaincy just now, and Jack was still smarting over the implication that he was no better than Barbossa. Indeed, the more he considered Jack Sparrow's words -- "The last man who told me what we _should_ be doing ended up with his own kingdom" -- the more Jack was inclined to take it as an insult. A mortal insult. For Barbossa had betrayed Jack Sparrow's trust in him; and it was for that, as much as for the sword in his hand and the light in his eyes as he came for Jack Shaftoe on the blood-washed deck of the doomed _Orion_ , that Jack'd slain him.

To be compared to Barbossa was cruel.

And for what? For wondering aloud whether Jack Sparrow actually had a plan at all, or was just planning to improvise as he went, according to whim. Or perhaps he was guided by the motions of the stars, or the whispered words of the _Black Pearl_ , or some other superstitious claptrap.

Jack peered down at the deck. Sparrow was at the helm, and his hands, oh his hands, caressed the ship's wheel the way they'd caressed _Jack_ that morning.

"Jealous of a _ship_ , Jack?" he could imagine his brother Bob saying.

Jack could see Bob quite clearly in his mind's eye -- a sure indication, had he considered it, that his inner self, his soul if you like, was in turmoil. His brother ("I wonder what Bob's up to these days?" thought Jack, ever ready to digress even whilst arguing with himself) was eyeing him with gleeful amusement. It was a look that Jack remembered well from his misspent boyhood, when it had invariably heralded weeks of teasing and sly references to some imagin'd vulnerability.

"Not jealous at all, Bob," Jack replied, in the privacy of his thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were. "It's not like that."

"Then what, pray, _is_ it like?"

It was a good question; it was, by some incredible coincidence, a question that Jack had asked himself more than once over the past few days, since the burning of the _Orion_ and his return to the glorious _Black Pearl_. What drew him to Jack Sparrow? Infuriating, subtle, prideful Jack Sparrow, whose mouth spouted so many tangled, rambling words that poor Jack was a-mazed; at least -- and don't forget this, Jack -- when he wasn't enraptured, seduced and completely corrupted by Jack Sparrow's mouth, and the wickedness (verbal and otherwise) of which it was capable. Not that the wickedness was limited to his mouth. Jack's skin tautened and tingled with the ache of last night's wickedness, and the euphoria of this morning's.

"It's like nothing else ever," he said to imaginary Bob. "It's like the best girl you ever had, but strong enough to take everything you want to give her; or like wrestling with your mate, except it doesn't stop when one of you's down; or like sword-fighting, you know, like those duels we used to stage, where every move's like a dance and it's working just how you planned it --"

"I reckon you've been listening to that Imp," said Bob, frowning at a spot just above Jack's right shoulder. "Have to say, Jack, I never took you for a sodomite. You were always so keen on females."

Jack was at a loss as to how to respond to this. As if women and Jack Sparrow could not exist in the same world! As if he'd never look at a woman again! ... Come to think of it, it'd been a while since he'd had the _opportunity_ to do anything more than squint at some distant Indian with a suspiciously swaying walk. Anyway, Jack Sparrow swayed.  
  
Bob sighed as though Jack'd come up with an especially unwieldy excuse. "Does all that business make up for the madness, then?" he enquired. "And the way that you're haring off after an imaginary treasure, instead of going for one of them fat Spanish galleons?"

"I don't know," said Jack, since this was an imaginary conversation and Bob couldn't really hear him. _Were_ the days worth the nights? Was he really on board solely for the best fucking (whether given or, oh god, received) that he'd ever had? Wasn't there something more to it than that?

"Reckon you'll stay, then?" said Bob. "You never struck me as a sailor-lad neither, Jack, though I'll give you your due, you can swim well enough."

"I'm learning it all, Bob. Learning the ropes -- or 'stays', as we say on board ship -- and the spars and the sails. Jack's keen for me --"

"Oho! 'Jack', is it now?"

"-- keen for me to stay on board, and Bootstrap's a good man; he'll teach me what I need to know."

"You're not coming back, then?" said Bob. "Your mates'll be home soon. And what about the lovely Mary Dolores? She was asking after you just t'other day."

Jack thought of Mary Dolores, and suffered a brief pang of the heart: but then, from the deck below (like an anchor snagging on Reality and wrenching him out of his reverie) came the sound of Jack Sparrow's laughter. Jack blinked, surprised by the angle of the sun and the vividness of his phant'sied conversation -- already fading fast -- with his absent brother.

"Not yet," he said aloud, to Bob or himself or the Imp. "I'm not leaving yet."


	2. Chapter 2

  
  
"Aye, that's the tavern, _there_ ," said Ragetti to Bill Turner, and Bill nodded and smiled and gazed at the nearing shore as though he longed for nothing more than a draught of some dubious native brew. The _Black Pearl_ 's crew -- those who weren't engaged in bringing the ship to anchor in the lee of the headland -- lined the rail, assessing the little fishing village for opportunities.

"Any women there, mate?" said Joe Turk.

"Din't notice," said Ragetti, hanging his head. "We weren't there long, see, and Pintel --"

"Course there're women," interjected Jack Sparrow, leaning in between the two of 'em before there could be any maudlin talk. "They'll come from miles around for you, Mr Turk: any maid with an eye for ... " He paused for the predictable ripple of laughter. "Well, I won't say for what."

It was the same village where they'd found Ragetti a week ago, drunkenly snoring in the shade behind the tavern. A week ago, the _Black Pearl_ 's sails had not even been reefed before Jack Sparrow had given the orders to weigh anchor and head out once more. There'd been no shore leave, no moonlit revelry, no heroic quantities of rum, or local rot-gut, or _anything_. Truth be told, it wasn't Jack's notion of an ideal watering-place, but there was a fine anchorage under the headland -- and, today, a European ship lying there.

Her paintwork was still bright: she'd sailed from Amsterdam, or Lisbon, or Portsmouth in the last few months, and her men -- half of 'em, no doubt, already in the tavern, and the rest of them importuning the local lasses -- would bring the latest news from Europe. Jack liked to keep abreast of the times, if not a step ahead of them. War in Europe might mean richer pickings on this side of the Atlantic, as the Spanish treasure-ships hurried home. Peace, conversely, might mean an influx of former soldiers, come to the Caribbean to seek their own, or other men's, fortunes. And besides, it'd do the ship's company good to set foot on solid land for a change.

"Looks charming," said Jack Shaftoe from just behind him, and Jack suppressed (with difficulty) the impulse to shuffle back until he could feel Shaftoe's body against his own.

"Lovely place," said Jack expansively. "We can buy up the day's catch, and drink it down with the week's brew: I swear to you it'll look positively delightful after that."

"Aye, Captain," said Jack Shaftoe softly, and Jack felt the huff of his breath on his neck: it sent a shiver, all the more delicious for the fact that he couldn't acknowledge it, right down to the base of his spine.

"Coming ashore, Mr Shaftoe?" he said briskly. "Bootstrap, who's taking first watch?"

"Rob and me, Captain," said Bill. "An' anyone else as cares to keep us company."

There was a generalised murmur, and a few of the men -- those who were more than usually jaded, or penniless, or unsociable -- indicated that they'd be willing to stay aboard.

"Splendid," said Jack. The sun was already low, and night came quickly this close to the equator; it'd be dark soon, and the _Black Pearl_ at her most vulnerable. He peered at the other ship, trying to determine the number and nature of her crew. There were no more than a handful of men on deck, gawping (Jack waved) at the legendary _Pearl_. The rest of 'em must be ashore, thus unlikely to mount an attack any time soon; and Bootstrap and Rob were quite capable of mounting a good defence if need be.

"D'you want to be relieved later, so you can have a spell ashore?" he asked Bill.

Bill shook his head. "Seen it, Captain, when we picked up this'un here." He gestured at Ragetti, who shot him a suspicious scowl. "Bring me back some of the local brew; that'll do well enough."

"And what of you, mate?" Jack asked Ragetti. "You've been here before: do you want to go back?"

Ragetti shuffled his feet. "I'll go ashore," he said, not meeting Jack's gaze; but then Ragetti seldom met any man's gaze for long. There was something shifty about him at the best of times, and shiftier now; but Jack was impatient to ensconce himself in the tavern's leafy porch, and could not be bothered to unravel whatever was on Ragetti's mind. His dead mate, no doubt: Jack had never cared overmuch for Pintel, but he hadn't deserved to be throttled by Barbossa.

But now they were lowering the gig, and clambering down into it; and once there, there were more immediate matters to consider, such as the press of Shaftoe's lean body against his own, and the heat of his skin, and the way that the other men in the boat were carefully not looking at the two of them -- not commenting, but not concerned either.

The tavern was already crowded, though the noise of it lessened considerably as every patron turned to look at the newcomers. Jack had repainted his eyes that morning, and burnished some of the duller fetishes and charms braided into his hair. At his side was tall, well-knit Jack Shaftoe, who -- with his long sandy-blond hair tied back neatly, and his sky-coloured eyes, and the gleaming cutlass (a formality, no more) at his side -- looked elegant and fierce at once, and drew as much attention as Jack Sparrow himself.

"Sir, won't you sit and take a drink with us?" said an English voice out of the gloom.

There were six of them, dressed in good plain garments that showed the marks of long use. They were speaking English amongst themselves, though Jack's sharp ears picked out long Dutch vowels and explosive German consonants. The oldest of them, a bearded fellow called Walter -- he did not give his surname -- had a West Country burr to his voice. They'd sailed from Amsterdam in the spring, he said, and had a fine crossing. The storms had been mild this year.

"You're far from home, then, gentlemen," said Jack Sparrow, dragging another three-legged stool into the space they'd made at their table. "What brings you to this part of the world?"

The men exchanged looks, and their expressions were unreadable in the flickering light of the lanthorn they'd just lit.

"Off to seek our fortunes, ain't we?" said Walter at last.

"Oh aye?" said Jack Shaftoe. Jack willed him to shut up, not to say anything about treasure, or maps, or gold; but Shaftoe, oblivious to the pressure of Jack's gaze, leant forward, all happy conviviality, and smiled at Walter and his mates.

* * *

"I've a mind to have a fortune of my own, too," said Jack Shaftoe, lifting his cup in a toast. The local brew (made from swamp water, perhaps, or rotting wood) was vile, one of the worst things he'd ever drunk in a long blurry history of accepting whatever was on offer. He'd no use for oblivion tonight, anyway, not with Jack Sparrow pressed against him from hip to knee, all hot and alive and irritated about something. Irritated, no doubt, at the way Jack was going about the matter; but Jack felt sure (shivery-sure) that he could assuage Sparrow's temper, later.

"Aye?" said Robert, the Kentishman, taking a deep draught from his own cup and swallowing hard to get it down. "And do you have a way to a fortune?"

"Hard work and God's mercy, of course," said Jack, trying not to sound too mocking. He hoped that his companions had been rendered sufficiently stupid, or uncritical, by their drinks that they would not question his un-Puritanical appearance, or the company he kept. "And yourselves?"

"We're heading south," said Walter gruffly.

"South, eh?" said Jack Sparrow. "What lies south, gentlemen? And how'll you reach it? I hear this river, this Orinoco river, is a great maze, and no ship can find her way through unless her master befriends the Indians who live in the drowned lands."

Jack looked askance at Sparrow, wondering whether this was another of his improbable tales; but he seemed sincere enough (though, with Jack Sparrow, sincerity came in layers), and the other men around the table were nodding and murmuring agreement.

"We have map," said the Dutchman -- Pietr? -- in bad English, and looked surprised when Walter scowled at him.

"Oh, a _map_ ," said Jack Sparrow heavily. "Well, gentlemen, I wish you all joy of your map." He contemplated the depths of his drink for a moment, like a man who has melancholy news to impart and is labouring to sweeten it. "What was it you were hoping to find?" he said at last, as though their silence had baited his curiosity beyond a sensible reticence.

"Our map, sir, will lead us to El Dorado!" said Walter impressively.

"I've heard that name," offered Jack Shaftoe, "in a play. 'Tis a real place, then?"

"Aye, and we know where it lies," said Walter.

"El Dorado?" said Jack Sparrow, querulous as an old man in a Southwark brothel. "What's that, then?"

Jack shot him another covert look. Sparrow looked utterly bemused: and, Jack could not help thinking, whorishly seductive in the warm golden light. Jack glanced around at the fortune-hunters, but none of them seemed to have noticed the way that the light gilded Jack Sparrow. And Sparrow's ignorance, though surely contrived, was convincing enough.

"'Tis a city," Jack explained, "deep in the jungle. They say there's gold there, more gold than you e'er saw in one place, and other riches beyond the dreams of men. Is it that place, Doctor?" he said directly to the silent man at the other end of the table.

"Aye," answered the man. Despite the heat of the evening -- the sun was down, now, and there were insects crowding around the lamp -- he wore a hood that cast his face into shadow. His voice was deep and musical. "The name, in Spanish, means 'the Golden One': but it signifies a great treasure, a treasure that none who sought have yet found."

"Sounds familiar," said Jack, carefully not looking at Sparrow. "If I'd a penny for every lost treasure I'd heard of, I'd be rich beyond the dreams of men too!"

None of them laughed, though Robert might've been suppressing a smile. Miserable sods, thought Jack.

"So where's this famous map, then?" said Jack Sparrow carelessly, taking another reckless draught of his drink.

"Not on our persons," said Walter, with belated caution. "In a safe place."

"On your little ship, then, all locked up away from prying eyes," said Sparrow. His head was tilted back, and the lamplight cast demon-shadows upon his face so that he seemed old and malicious. "And where did you find this map, eh?"

"We can't tell you that, sir," offered one of the younger men -- Francis, wasn't it? -- hastily, and more politely than any of his fellows had managed. "For fear of the knowledge falling into the wrong hands."

Sparrow lifted his hands theatrically. "These hands?" he said, spreading out his fingers so that they could see all his rings, and his scars, and the marks of hard use on his skin. "But why, gentlemen, would these be the wrong ones?"

"In El Dorado," said the Doctor suddenly, in a voice that did not carry but was nevertheless perfectly audible to them all, "there is a fountain that brings youth to the old, and health to the sick."

"Well," said Jack Shaftoe, "that's quite fascinating, but --"

"All Christendom would rush hither, chartering every ship, paddling themselves in row-boats and shallops and barrel-ends, if word of this reached their ears," said the Doctor, staring hard at Jack Sparrow. "And that is not how things should be."

"You want it for yourselves," accused Sparrow, without heat.

Walter rolled his eyes. "We want it for those who merit it," he corrected.

"And who decides that, gentlemen?" enquired Sparrow softly.

Jack Shaftoe had not known Sparrow for long, but he could see the tell-tale signs of anger: narrowing eyes, a tightness of the jaw, his words crowding together in his mouth. He wanted to touch Jack Sparrow; to take him from this place, and to be alone with him. None of the fortune-hunters were smiling now, either, and the tension around the table was almost palpable.

"There!" cried Sam suddenly, half-rising from his seat and pointing at the -- no, not at the wall (a panel of woven reeds, black-spotted with mould), but at the gap beneath the eaves. It was dark outside now, and the shiny leaves of the nearest tree reflected back the lanthorn-light; but something, someone, was moving out there. Jack saw the gleam of an eye, and the glint of a grimace; then the eavesdropper was blundering away into the undergrowth, not bothering to be quiet about it.

"Who's spying on us?" growled Walter, hand going to the hilt of his sword -- the scabbard banged against Jack Shaftoe's knee, and he scowled.

Sparrow, on Shaftoe's left, had sprung to his feet as soon as Sam'd sounded the alarm, peering out into the darkness and shading his eyes from the flickering light. Now he dropped back to his seat.

"My apologues, good sirs," he announced. "'Tis only a crewman of mine -- Ragetti by name -- he's a good fellow, but..." Jack Sparrow's hand performed two or three languorous rotations in the vicinity of his temple. "If you take my meaning. He'll do you no harm."

"Do you guarantee it?" demanded the Doctor, both hands on the creaking table before him.

"I do," said Jack Sparrow earnestly, after only a moment's hesitation. "We're sailing tomorrow, anyway: just stopped off in this quaint little village for food and water, not forgetting the unexpected pleasure of your company, of course. We've business north of here, and we'll leave you to your own."

Jack watched him speak, and wanted to silence that clever mouth -- he was sure he knew a way, and it was increasingly difficult not to succumb to the urge to test it, and close his own mouth over Jack Sparrow's -- since it was so clearly lying. But it _had_ been Ragetti outside, he was almost sure of it; and while Ragetti'd no business to skulk outside the tavern like that, Jack did not think he had the wit to make use of anything he'd learnt.

"Aye," he said, nodding. "You've nothing to fear from him."

* * *

Jack Sparrow couldn't help but hear the veiled threat in Shaftoe's words: but it seemed that he was alone in this, and that Walter and his mates were pure of heart and unsuspicious by nature. More fool them, thought Jack.

"I'll speak to Mr Ragetti when we're back on board," he assured them all. "And, gentlemen, your expedition's goal is safe with me, for I've other business to attend to, as I said; and I wish you well of your own treasure-hunting, though I fear you've pinned your hopes on a phant'sy that you'll never find. Well, Mr Shaftoe," he said abruptly, "shall we be going? For I'll wager --" (sketching a bow in Walter's direction) "-- that young Ragetti's nosiness has quite worn out our welcome."

There was a chorus of protests from Francis, Pietr, Sam and Robert; but they were not very sincere protests, and they were quickly done. The Doctor said nothing, but he glared at Jack as he made his farewells.

"Good luck with your own ... business," said Walter, standing to shake Jack's hand. He looked Jack up and down, taking note this time of Jack's various effects and accoutrements, and his mouth acquired a sour twist that had not been there before. "Perhaps we'll meet again."

"Perhaps," said Jack, with his briefest smile. "Though if you're Orinoco-bound, mate, I doubt it extremely."

There was a clutch of the _Pearl's_ crew near the tavern door, downing their nasty drinks as quickly as possible, thus avoiding all but the merest hint of the taste. They yelled cheerful greetings at Jack and Shaftoe.

"Any of you boys seen Ragetti?" enquired Jack.

"Aye," said one; and Joe Stone said, "'E's out looking for 'is mate."

"Pintel?" said Shaftoe. "Pintel's _dead_ , ain't he? Even Ragetti wouldn't go looking for a dead man, would he?"

"Lookin' for the _grave_ ," clarified Black Davies, the _Pearl's_ cook, spitting out fish bones.

"If these bloody heathens bothered to bury 'im," said Joe: and there was a brief, uncomfortable silence, for though Pintel hadn't exactly been popular, he'd been around for a long time.

"We're heading back to the _Black Pearl_ , gentlemen," said Jack. Shaftoe looked askance at him, and Jack wondered if he was going to argue about it. He'd no intention of describing, in front of half his crew, what he had in mind for Jack Shaftoe once they were alone in his cabin; but then again, it might make Shaftoe blush, which was always entertaining.

But Shaftoe said nothing, even when Joe offered to row them out to the ship so that he could bring the gig back to the beach, ready for the sore-headed withdrawal, tomorrow morning, of the _Black Pearl_ 's company. From all appearances (and Jack was happy to lounge in the gig's bow, observing Jack Shaftoe closely) he was deep in thought. With any luck, thought Jack Sparrow (leering reflexively at Shaftoe with such intensity that Joe Stone blushed and looked away) he'd have some plans for later, once Jack had implemented his own.

Joe had turned the gig and was heading back to the village beach before Shaftoe had clambered over the gunwale. He was already taking off his coat, and Jack nodded approvingly at this encouraging display of eagerness.

"No trouble, Bill?" he said, as Bootstrap (carefully not staring at Jack Shaftoe's increasing state of undress) sauntered up out of the shadows.

"Nothing, captain. No more'n a couple of blokes over on the _Gloriana_ , neither: they was asking if we'd tobacco to spare, earlier."

"I hope you made a good profit on it, Mr Turner," said Jack. "Now, I'm for my bed, and --"

"I've a little errand to run," said Jack Shaftoe directly to him, standing there in (Jack swallowed) no more than cotton drawers. Shaftoe grinned at him, and before Jack could ask the obvious question -- or even the _second_ most obvious one, viz. "But surely you'd prefer to be roundly fucked until neither of us has a single drop more to spend?" -- he was over the port rail. A moment later Bill and Jack, still looking at one another in confusion, heard the soft splash as Jack Shaftoe launched himself into the warm night ocean.


	3. Mortal Hazards, Chapter Three

  
  
The water was warm and faintly phosphorescing, and no doubt rife with poisonous jellies and sea-snakes; but Jack Shaftoe refused to think about those. He swam gently, with as little splashing as possible, around the dark curve of the _Black Pearl_ 's hull. Then, crooking his arm round the anchor-cable, he peered at the ... what had Bill called her? The _Gloriana_.

She was not a large ship, though sturdily built for the long Atlantic crossing that she had made. Jack counted the gunports: eight this side, and thus eight on t'other, else she'd keel over with the uneven weight of her guns. Two men to each gun, plus enough of a crew to keep her sailing in a battle: say forty men, at the very least. He'd seen six of 'em in the village tavern, and there'd been plenty of other men of a European cast, eyeing the pirate crew of the _Black Pearl_ with flattering circumspection. Ha! He was thinking like a pirate himself now, and it was all Jack Sparrow's fault.

Even in the warm dark ocean, Jack felt a frisson of desire course through him. He longed to be back with Jack Sparrow, skin to naked skin, pressed close and longing to be closer. He longed for it so much that for a moment he glanced up at the _Pearl_ 's figurehead, looming above him, and thought of hand-over-handing himself up the anchor cable, back onto the deck and thence to the captain's cabin, there to revel.

But no: Jack had a Plan. He had been staring at the _Gloriana_ for a reason, and now he returned his attention to the other ship. There, near the rudder-post: the flare of a pipe, and the scent of strong tobacco (that evil stuff that Bill'd been trying to flog ever since Jack Shaftoe had come aboard the _Pearl_ ) drifted out over the water. That was one watchman: where were the others?

Jack pushed off and began to swim, slowly and carefully and with his head turned to one side, facing away from the ship, so that the pale blur of his face would less easily attract the eye. Every few slow strokes he lifted his head to breathe, and to steal a glance at the _Gloriana_. There was a lanthorn on a rope, hanging from the yardarm, and as he swam nearer Jack could hear men speaking softly to one another. "My trick," said one, and another, "four cups." Then the first said, "deal again," and Jack understood that they were playing cards, in the foreign way with cups and swords and the like, not good old clubs and hearts.

There was a moderate current, moving him in towards the beach, but nothing as fierce as the tidal race at Greenwich where he'd first learnt to keep himself afloat. Colder there, of course: Jack had once, through an improbable chain of coincidences involving a stolen watch and a careless butler, had a proper bath, and it'd been just about this temperature, though it hadn't given off a weird glow -- careful of that, Jack, they'll pick you off easy as tickling trout -- at every disturbance.

And here he was at last in the lee of the _Gloriana_ , staring up at her tarred and barnacled hull (Dutch-built, no doubt) and at her for'ard anchor-cable, festooned with streamers of slimy weed, and tautened by the tide. The card-players were well aft, and he could hear them bickering about the creased corner of the Ace of Coins. The solitary watchman with his nasty pipe was at the ship's stern, and the smell of rotten tobacco would precede him should he venture for'ard again. Compared to some of the ships he'd crept aboard in Greenwich Reach, this would be laughably easy: in, out, and back to Jack Sparrow, with that heat in his eyes and ...

Jack pinched himself: grabbed the cable and hung on it a moment, in case Walter and his mates had thought of bells, or of attaching the anchor-cable to the watchman's person, or anything devious of that nature. Nothing. No alarums or excursions: no curses or projectiles: no notice taken at all.

Up the cable, into the reeking cable-tier, and thence -- it was not so very different to the _Black Pearl_ , or the _Henrietta Marie_ \-- aft, towards the cabins, where surely all the treasure-seekers' secrets would be kept.

* * *

Jack Sparrow was pacing -- not least because the men on the _Gloriana_ had surely seen himself and Shaftoe return in the gig, and by displaying two men (himself and Bill) for them to see, he was making it ever so much less likely that they'd start wondering where anyone was. Anyway, there was no point in going below: he ached with desire, but had no intention of doing anything about that ache until he had Shaftoe there to do things _with_.

If Bill Turner thought his captain more than usually cantankerous, demented or fevered, he did not mention it. He leaned against the gunwale, at the edge of the circle of lanthorn-light, watching Jack. After a while he said, "So what's all that about, then?"

"Mr Shaftoe," said Jack, low and biting, "has fallen for one of those travellers' tales -- no, nothing like Don Guimaraes' little secret, nothing like that at all -- as lately recounted, in that fine tavern at the top of the beach, by _Gloriana_ 's Owners, or at least those who've brought her to this place."

"Aye?" said Bill cautiously. "And what tale's brought them here?"

"Some pretty nonsense about the Fountain of Youth," said Jack, rolling his eyes. "Now, I reckon Mr Shaftoe's taken a phant'sy to that tale, and my guess is that he's swum off to relieve them of their clever little map, so that he may bring it to me."

He did not look towards the _Gloriana_ , for he was afraid he'd see Jack Shaftoe scrambling aboard; or, worse, see him arrested in the process. But surely he was there by now? Jack glared at Bootstrap, daring him to offer any comment on Jack Shaftoe's probable motives for the presum'd robbery.

"Does he not know about ... our own business, then?" said Bill.

"He does not."

"Maybe you should've told him, Jack."

Jack Sparrow, about to snap a pithy retort at his First Mate, bit back his words. Bill'd called him 'Jack', not 'Captain': which meant that his advice was meant friendly-like, and not the impertinent argument of Mate to Captain.

"P'rhaps you're right," he said slowly. "I don't want too many rumours flying about, or we'll be trailing our own little Armada of followers, but --"

"What's Jack Shaftoe to you?"

"I'd've thought that was obvious, mate," said Jack, leering.

Bill gave his captain an exasperated look. " _Apart_ from the obvious, Jack. Is he crew? Are you going to make him Mate, or Bosun, or something? Or is he here as your ... your friend, and nothing more?"

Jack thought about this for a while. What, indeed, _was_ Jack Shaftoe to him? Someone to talk to, argue with, laugh with, get drunk with. Someone as wild as Jack himself; someone who'd leapt from the maintop, and pulled Jack after him, for the sheer thrill of it. Someone (here Jack experienced a peculiar sensation, halfway 'twixt a shiver of cold and a springing of sweat, over his whole body) of whom Jack could not get enough, whether fucking or being fucked, or tonguing or fondling or pressed close, kissing ...

Good thing it was dark: but even so, Bill was looking fondly amused, which wouldn't do at all.

"I don't know yet," said Jack Sparrow, eyes narrowed, apparently examining some imagined flaw on the _Pearl_ 's black deck. And then, reluctantly, when Bill said nothing: "But whatever he is, mate, it matters."

* * *

Walter's cabin smelt of Walter -- a strangely earthy odour, considering the months at sea -- and Jack, still dripping salt water onto the bare planks of the deck, was sure that he'd find the map here. Somehow. Didn't help that it was dark: the moon was rising, but it was only a quarter-full, and the cabin's porthole was dull with salt.

Jack's eyes were adjusting to the darkness, though, and he knew more or less what he was looking for: either a long, thin tube in which parchment or paper might be rolled, or the map itself, spread out and weighted at each corner. Easier to identify, for sure, but then he'd have to keep it dry during the brief (though theoretically perilous) swim back to the _Black Pearl_.

Walter was a messy sod, who scattered half-read books and pungent clothes strewn everywhere. (Jack, who had never possessed sufficient objects with which to be untidy, regarded the tangle with faint contempt.) There was a long cylinder shoved down the back of his foetid bunk: investigated, though, it proved to be no more than a musket-barrel.

If not Walter -- whom Jack took to be the captain of the ship -- then which of the _Gloriana_ 's crew would be the guardian of their treasure-map? Jack paused to listen for noises from above, then ducked into the next cabin and began to rifle it methodically while he thought. For it would be unthinkable to return without _something_ , now.

This cabin was the Doctor's, Jack was sure of it: books neatly arrayed in their rack; a chest of stenchful ingredients, as toted around by alchemists and other frauds who Jack'd encountered in his youth; far fewer filthy clothes, and those more comprehensively vile, than in Walter's cabin ... and, here beneath the bunk, a case covered in sticky cloth, as long as Jack's forearm, with a brass-clad top that unscrewed, and something made of paper within.

And outside, as if at some signal, the sound of plashing oars. The _Gloriana_ 's complement – or some of it, at least -- returning: and Jack had no wish to stay and greet them.

There was already someone coming down the stairway from the upper deck: Jack, clutching his prize and barely daring to breathe, crept back into the Doctor's cabin and crouched down, hoping to be taken for no more than a shadow but horribly aware that he was cornered, and that a single ray of light from the approaching figure's lanthorn -- a single eye-beam, or whatever it was that enabled the eye to perceive the world around it -- would betray him utterly. And those slow, arrhythmic footsteps might be the Doctor's -- had there not been a staff beside him, in the tavern? -- whose reaction, upon finding a Vagabond beside his bunk, was unlikely to be welcoming.

* * *

"Jack," said Bill softly, nudging his captain' arm to get his attention.

"Aye?"

"The _Gloriana_ 's owners are heading back."

Jack Sparrow followed Bill's gaze to the cutter heading for the other ship, and swore vilely. "Mr Shaftoe'd better hurry himself," he said. Shaftoe would've noticed their return, surely? For now the watch on the _Gloriana_ 's deck, focus of Jack's gaze this half-hour past, had bestirred themselves: a couple of men were getting to their feet from where they'd been sat, out of sight beneath the gunwale, near the mizzenmast. The sentry at the stern, tipping his glowing pipe into the waves, was waving -- Jack could see him quite clearly, now that the moon was up -- at the cutter, stretching out his arm for the boat's painter.

And there was no sign of Jack Shaftoe, not even when the men in the cutter made their clumsy ascents of the ship's steep stern; not when they gathered on deck, quizzing the watch about disturbances and activities; not even when (with a genial wave in Jack Sparrow's approximate direction, which did nothing at all to endear them to him) they began to make their ways, singly and in pairs, below deck.

"He's coming back," said Bill urgently, with a gesture that might've started out as pointing, before he thought better of sharing his observation with the crew of the other ship.

Jack indulged himself in a single long breath of relief. "Where?" he demanded then, spinning round on one heel and staring towards the _Gloriana_ as though his attention would lend Jack Shaftoe speed.

At first he could not make out Shaftoe's form at all: but, following the line of Bill's gaze, Jack saw a faint limning of greenish light, as though the light of the rising moon had been refracted by some viridian gem beneath the water. After a while he made it out to be the natural luminescence of the tropical ocean, stirred and disturbed by Jack Shaftoe's passage through it.

Shaftoe swam strongly, without overmuch splashing, and he was making good progress. There were lights gleaming across the water from several of the _Gloriana_ 's portholes now, but the reflected light did not stretch far enough to touch Shaftoe's gleaming skin.

"No uproar, over there," said Bill Turner.

"Aye," said Jack Sparrow heavily. "He's come away with nothing, then."

"Yet it was bravely done," said Bill.

Jack snorted. "Recklessly done," he muttered, low enough that Bill could pretend not to have heard him. 'Twas that same impulse that'd hurled Shaftoe (with Sparrow close behind) from the maintop that afternoon just after Barbossa's mutiny, no doubt; that Imp that drove and goaded him, now inducing him to win prizes for Jack.

And the thought of Shaftoe bringing him that treasure -- or bringing him, empty-handed, the treasure of himself -- made Jack Sparrow's heart race, though the danger that Shaftoe had courted was past.

* * *

Perhaps it had been close -- Jack Shaftoe could've sworn that the halting footsteps had paused outside the Doctor's cabin, as though their owner knew that an intruder lurked there -- but after all, there had been no outcry, no alarm, no capture. Jack had slipped over the gunwale -- on the larboard side, unfortunately, away from the _Pearl_ : but the men who'd returned from the tavern were gathered by the starboard rail, discussing the _Black Pearl_ in hushed and furtive tones -- and into the warm ocean. The map-case, hopefully waterproofed in its layers of tarry leather and cotton, was tucked awkwardly into the waist of his drawers, where it hindered his movements: but best not to move too swiftly anyway, in case any of the _Gloriana_ 's ineffectual watch should notice him by the paleness of his skin, or the slight glow that clung to him like phosphorescence to new-landed fish, or by the splashes that he made from time to time, when he mistimed the crest of a wave and his limbs broke free of the water.

Still no fuss on board the _Gloriana_ : perhaps they'd be away before the theft was discovered. Or perhaps the _Gloriana_ would fire upon the _Black Pearl_ : Jack Shaftoe had little experience of naval engagements, but he was certain that the _Pearl_ could snap up the other ship, and spit out any on board that she didn't care for. Not that they'd been bad fellows, or unlikeable, or unfriendly: but Jack had taken something from them, and in his experience this tended to lead to hostility rather than hospitality.

The tide, turning, was with him, carrying him away from the beach and -- unexpectedly, but most serendipitously -- towards the _Pearl_. Most of the pirate company were still ashore, and the ship was eerily quiet: but Jack Shaftoe, glancing up as he neared the dark wall of the hull, saw Bill watching him, and Jack Sparrow. Bill was grinning; but Jack could not read Sparrow's expression at all.

The _Black Pearl_ had swung around with the tide, and her bow was towards the _Gloriana_. Bill jerked his head at something behind -- no, no, he was directing Jack towards the starboard side of the ship, where his arrival might be less immediately obvious to any man watching from the _Gloriana_. Jack was tiring (mostly from the effort of swimming silently), but he nodded at Bill -- no matter if the motion was visible or not -- and took himself around the bow to the starboard side.

It was darker here, out of the moonlight. Someone -- presumably Bill or Jack -- had left a rope handy, and Jack grabbed hold of it with one hand: then, wedging the map-case under his other arm, he hauled himself up the side of the ship. As he reached for the gunwale, a sinewy hand grabbed his arm and pulled him up and over: and Jack Sparrow was there, so _there_ that Jack could feel the heat pouring off Sparrow's body, delicious to his own clammy skin. Sparrow was smiling at him, but it was a sharp-edged smile. Jack, snagged by that and Sparrow's radiant warmth, and most of all by the other heat that he saw in Jack Sparrow's eyes, felt himself hardening; oh, closer, closer...

Sparrow lifted a lanthorn in his other hand, and looked Jack Shaftoe up and down, with an attentiveness that made Jack's heart race.

"My cabin, Mr Shaftoe," he said. "Now."


	4. Mortal Hazards, Chapter Four

  


Jack shut the cabin door behind them both -- Bill wouldn't disturb him tonight, not without excellent reason -- and leaned against it, drinking in the spine-melting sight of Jack Shaftoe, who was naked except for soaking wet cotton drawers that clung lewdly to his skin, and (Jack's eyes widened, then narrowed) to his semi-erect cock. Shaftoe was gazing back at him, smiling broadly, and in his hand was a long tube wrapped in tar-cloth and oiled leather, seawater still beading on it the way that it beaded (so much more interestingly) on Jack Shaftoe's bare chest.

"Is that for me, Mr Shaftoe?" said Jack, deliberately letting his gaze drift back down to Shaftoe's groin: his words conjured movement there, and Jack phant’sied he could see Shaftoe hardening for him.

"It is," said Jack Shaftoe, with a thoroughly unsavoury smile that made Jack's own cock leap. He balanced the map-case on the palm of one hand, proffering it.

Jack made no move to accept this most inconvenient of gifts. "Take it back," he said, not looking Shaftoe in the eye.

"What? I --"

"Take it back, Mr Shaftoe; it's not as though they won't know who to blame for this entirely coincidental disappearance, now, is it?"

"We can take 'em," said Jack Shaftoe, with more confidence than was entirely sane.

"Aye," said Jack, turning away. "But that makes it a murdering matter, and a race: and, besides, I've something better."

Shaftoe, standing there with skin paled from cold, cocked an inquisitive eyebrow; and Jack wanted to lay hands on him, never mind the map, and set him ablaze again.

He hadn't acknowledged the gift, hadn't taken it from Jack Shaftoe's chilly hand: and that seemed cruel, now, so Jack reached out and took the tube, and pressed his flask, still warm from his hip-pocket, into Shaftoe's damp hand in return. "Drink, Jack; you'll take a fever. Sit down and drink."

"If I'm to take back --" began Shaftoe truculently.

"Let me look at it first," said Jack. There was a small desk that could be folded down from the wall, though seldom was; he unhooked it now. The map in the tube smelt of oil, and mould, and ink, but it was dry and the lines hadn't run. He unrolled the stiff paper, weighting its corners with an orange, his pistol, an inkwell and his right hand.

"Is it any good?" said Jack Shaftoe, from the bunk behind him.

Jack squinted in the dim amber light. Many of the names on the map were unknown to him, but the coastline was familiar from the sailing-charts (the Navy's finest) that he used when he was in these waters. Inland -- though of course he had never been inland -- were tangled rivers and thatch-roofed villages, quaintly European, drawn mid-jungle. In the corner of the map, next to the compass rose, was a mark that might've been an inkblot or a flaw in the paper. Jack leaned closer, curious and mistrustful.

"Aye, it's good," he said heavily. "The man who made this map knew what he was doing."

"Then why must I take it back?" Shaftoe did not sound overly perturbed, which probably meant that he was up to something. Jack smiled secretly to himself at the thought.

"Because I don't care to fight the _Gloriana_ for _that_ treasure, not when we've our own to seek," said Jack. He turned, then, with the intention of swearing Shaftoe to secrecy, or at least making him keep his voice down: but Shaftoe, without even speaking, robbed Jack of his words, for he was sprawled naked on Jack's bunk.

* * *

This was not exactly the reception that Jack Shaftoe had hoped for, but the heat had never quite gone from Sparrow's dark eyes, and now it was twice as heady as before. Jack had known women who'd had this effect on their men, and he had always resented their power over him; but now, the tables turned, he revelled in it. Never mind the damned map, or the quest, or eternal youth, while Jack Sparrow was looking at him this way.

Nevertheless, Jack's vestigial pride urged him to keep Sparrow waiting awhile yet.

"I'll take the map back if you wish, Captain," he said, and noted the narrowing of Jack Sparrow's eyes at Jack's rare and momentous use of his title.

"I've not thanked you properly for bringing it to me," said Sparrow, who was now leaning back against the edge of his little hanging table, hands braced against the bloody map, eyes focussed wholly upon Jack himself.

"Thought you might find it of interest," said Jack idly, shifting to display himself more advantageously. "Course, I wasn't in possession of all the facts -- for example, this other treasure of yours."

"'Tis a secret only so that word doesn't get bandied about," said Sparrow distractedly. (Jack had let his hand drift to his hip, so close to his cock that he could feel the heat from it on the skin of his knuckles.) "You've seen tonight how sailors talk: now, _their_ little secret's theirs no longer, though --"

"-- though you'd have me return the _proof_ of it to them," said Jack. "What, shall I just take it over and present it to good ol' Walt? 'Sorry, mate, you left this in the pub, thought I'd drop it off since I was passing.' Of course, he won't believe I couldn't --"

Here Jack stopped speaking, overtaken by a thought. A foolish one, surely; but it might restore some value to his unappreciated gift.

"Jack," he said, "since you say it's worth something ... can you not copy it?"

"I --" began Sparrow, and then stopped and scowled thoughtfully.

"Aye," he said at last. "I've paper and ink here: but _now_ , Jack?"

Jack did his best to shrug with his whole body, and smirked to himself when he saw the twitch of Sparrow's hands.

"If you want it returned to 'em tonight," he said, "then now it must be. I'd help, but ..." Jack spread his hands, all innocence. "Your hands are apter at it than mine'll ever be."

Sparrow was looking at Jack's hands, with particular attention to the way that they had fallen upon Jack's naked, slowly-warming skin: Jack's right hand was on his thigh, thumb just brushing the hair at his groin, and his left was spread above his heart. He wondered where Sparrow would touch him first.

* * *

Jack Sparrow was nigh overcome with frustration, and the worst of it was that he’d brought it upon himself. Easier by far to tell Shaftoe that it was a great prize, worth its weight in rubies, et cetera et cetera; and then, letting the map fall disregarded to the deck, to prove to Shaftoe how very much _he_ was valued by Jack Sparrow.

There were a couple of problems with that scenario, though Jack's blood surged at the notion of claiming Shaftoe once again. (He busied himself with finding a clean sheet of paper -- never mind the pornographic sketch that adorned its reverse -- and mixing ink.) Firstly, he'd no intention of turning Walter, and more particularly Walter's friends, against himself or his _Pearl_. It was true that the _Black Pearl_ could defeat the _Gloriana_ , should he care to pit his ship against that other; but it'd mean unnecessary bloodshed, and delay, and damage to his beloved. (To the _Pearl_ , clarified Jack to himself, sheering away from other interpretations like a Puritan lass from a brothel.) He hadn't yet decoded Don Guimaraes's spidery scrawl, and the Spaniard had been over-fond of vivid similitudes; but he was almost sure that the treasure could only be found, or at any rate _recognised_ , at full moon. Why that might be Jack didn't know, but that gave them a scant ten days to find the mysterious Island of which the Don had written.

(Oh, Christ and all the saints: Jack Shaftoe on his bunk, stretched out naked, the warmth of the small cabin driving out the cool pallor of his skin. Oh, the way he was looking at Jack. That knowing look.)

Which meant that Walter and his mates must have their map again, before dawn if possible: certainly soon enough that, even if anyone raised the alarm, the map could be plausibly rediscovered in some out-of-the-way corner of the _Gloriana_ 's cabin-space. For it wasn't the fabulous invention that Jack had both hoped and feared to see. He recognised the signature, and the man who'd made this map would not have lied. It was of great value, and Jack doubted that the men who owned it now knew what they held. Though Walter'd been a good fellow; and that Doctor, who had reminded Jack so very much of certain learned men of his acquaintance...

No matter. There was too much on his mind, and too little of the night left to give it all its due. Map first. The rough east-west stretch of the coast was easy enough to sketch; but then it fell away sharply, and the space that might have been simple solid ground was a-mazed into islands, a shattered archipelago of little islands -- some of them no longer distinct from their neighbours, Jack knew -- that crowded into the Orinoco's broad mouth.

He'd promised himself that he'd look up only when his pen ran dry: but Shaftoe, lying there with lips provocatively parted, his hand wrapped loosely around the flushed shaft of his prick, eyes glittering bluely at Jack ...

"You said something," murmured Shaftoe, "about the man who made this map. Someone you know, is it?"

Jack blinked, and urged his brain to action, its vital forces having been usurped by other parts of his body.

"Let me tell you something about this Fountain of Youth," he said; and Shaftoe's taunting hand stilled on his cock as he nodded.

Jack bent again to his labour, and spoke over his shoulder, for the sheer awareness of Shaftoe's presence was distraction enough.

* * *

"Way back in Good Queen Bess's time," said Sparrow abstractedly, "she sent her courtiers and her sailors -- no Navy then, or not as we'd know it -- to run circles round the Earth for her, and bring back stories and maps, pictures and treasure; whatever they could find for her."

"Aye, I know girls like that," said Jack Shaftoe softly, wishing Sparrow would look at him again instead of scratching away so busily at that paper. The scratching was growing louder, though, and that meant that Sparrow's pen was running dry: he’d look up soon.

"Anyway," said Sparrow, squinting at the map, "one of her pretty lords came down to Guiana, and fell in with some dodgy Spanish conquistadores, who'd come down the Orinoco from some distant Inca city."

"Saw a play about that," interjected Jack knowledgeably. Sparrow was looking at him now, not disguising his interest, and Jack held his gaze and ran his other hand down the meridian of his chest, down to meet the hand curved around his cock; and could not help the noise he made at the way Jack Sparrow bit his lip.

"About the Incas," he clarified, with difficulty. "Gold everywhere, eh?"

"Indeed," said Sparrow, eyes solidly black. He swallowed, and seemed to recover a little of his composure. "Anyway, this gentleman -- Raleigh was his name -- listened to their tales, and he was most taken -- like yourself, Jack -- with the notion of eternal youth."

"It's a beguiling idea," said Jack, leaning up on one elbow to see how much more map there was for Sparrow to copy. So many little lines, still, and Sparrow was meticulously transcribing each one of them. "But where does this map come in?"

"This map," said Sparrow, flashing him a gilded grin as he dipped his quill into the inkpot again, "was drawn by Raleigh's cartographer, which is to say --"

"Yes, yes, a maker of maps," Jack said impatiently. "How d'you know he was the one that drew it, eh?"

"He was my grandfather," said Sparrow, and Jack could not tell if he was exasperated or amused.

"Did they find it, then?" he persisted, filing away this nugget of Sparrow-history for later assay.

Sparrow laid down his pen (yes!) and turned around. The cabin was so small that, leaning forward, his face was close enough for Jack to reach up and touch; but instead he left his hand where it was, thumb slicking that clear secretion over the taut-skinned head of his cock, and hoped that Jack Sparrow would have mercy, or would succumb.

* * *

"What do you think, Mr Shaftoe?" said Jack Sparrow, trying to ignore the ache that Shaftoe's proximity produced, not just in his cock, but in every inch of skin and every drop of blood in his body. He'd suffered native poisons (not necessarily lethally intended) that had affected him less than this man’s mere presence. He felt giddy with it.

Oh, that bloody map. Three-quarters copied, and Jack was so tempted to scribble random lines over the rough paper and declare it done. Yet he'd another notion too, for confounding Walter and his friends; and there was Shaftoe, and his curiosity, to satisfy.

Shaftoe was staring at him thoughtfully, though the increasing motion of his hand on his cock -- a deliciously lewd and decadent display -- had surely blunted those thoughts. "I don't know," he said at last, frowning; and Jack frowned too until he recalled the question -- rhetorical, really -- that he'd asked.

"They didn't find it," he said flatly. "Raleigh went back to England and grew old, though his Queen had him beheaded before he fell into his dotage. Half his men died in Brazil or Guiana, or mid-Atlantic in the storms."

"And your grandfather?" said Shaftoe, hand stilling, eyes dizzyingly intent upon Jack's.

"He stayed here," said Jack Sparrow. "He liked the country. Met my grandmother." If he didn't turn back to the map now, he would never be done with it; Jack Shaftoe's skin was glowing like warm bronze in the lamplight, and his eyes were a dark clear blue, like the sky at dusk, and his tongue sneaking out between his lips... "Harlot," said Jack, and Shaftoe chuckled.

"So your treasure's not the same as theirs," said Shaftoe, thickly, as Jack traced the course of the river south-west, marking each town with its forgotten name.

"My treasure -- Don Guimaraes' treasure, I should say, though he'll not have any use for it where he's gone -- is as ancient as this fabled El Dorado they're all after," said Jack, shifting his hips (he was perched on the edge of his sea-chest) in the hope of alleviating the growing ache in his own prick. He dared not look at Jack Shaftoe now. "My treasure -- our treasure, Jack, yours and mine and every man-jack of the _Black Pearl_ 's company -- is Aztec gold."

Shaftoe made a rude noise, and Jack wanted very much to look at the shape of his mouth. "Gold," he said. "Gold's easily got, or taken. You can't take it with you, though, and all of us are mortal --"

"Aha," said Jack triumphantly, "but this gold gifts its owner -- or owners, mate, or owners -- with life everlasting." He scrawled a final triumphant river-course, tributary to some southern lake he'd never seen on any other map, and set aside his pen.

"Life everlasting?" repeated Jack Shaftoe, and his voice would've sounded stupid if Jack had not turned to see the sweet anguish on his face as he brought himself ever closer to the edge.

* * *

"Life everlasting," confirmed Jack Sparrow, and his voice was suddenly much closer, his breath warm on Jack's skin. Jack forced his eyes open -- he had been dissolving in a vision of Sparrow's hands, mouth, cock all conspiring to bring him off, and the touch of his own hand was becoming almost painful -- and stared hungrily at Sparrow.

"Immortality," he said, dredging up the word from some Pox-mangled corner of his brain. Jack Sparrow was crouched before him, his hand coming up to cup Jack's chin; Jack snaked out his tongue and tasted the ink on Sparrow's blackened fingers, and they both groaned.

"You, Mr Shaftoe, are a very wicked tease," congratulated Sparrow. At least, that was how Jack pieced together the sentence; but Sparrow punctuated, or over-punctuated, it with sly caresses and uncaresses: for so Jack termed the shiver-inducing moments when Sparrow most carefully did _not_ touch him, and yet brought hand or mouth so close that Jack could feel the moisture of his breath, or the heat of his skin. They had stopped talking about immortality; or possibly they were still talking about it, but Jack's brain was no longer capable of recognising any words that were not relevant to the immediate moment, and the chance -- nay, certainty, surely, one way or t'other -- of carnal satisfaction any moment now ...

He groaned more loudly than before when Sparrow, with a devilish -- Impish -- grin, ran his tongue over Jack's own fingers where they were still stroking his cock; then Sparrow's hot clever mouth was closing around his cockhead, lips tightening, drawing him in; and Jack could not help himself, his hands were tangling in Sparrow's mazy hair, holding him still so that Jack could slide into and out of and into and _into_ his mouth -- Sparrow's eyes, wide and black with wickedness and glee, met Jack's desperate gaze, and then Sparrow took him further and Jack felt his body rush him the rest of the way, so that he was pouring forth into Sparrow's cunning mouth and Jack Sparrow, was drinking him down, hands mapping soothing courses on Jack's belly and thighs, lapping gently, grinning up at him ...

Jack pulled Sparrow closer and kissed him soundly, dizzy all over again at the taste of himself against the metallic taint of Jack Sparrow's own dental treasure-trove: and when their kiss had run its course, and Sparrow's mouth held no more trace of Jack's seed, Jack pulled back a little, and said, "Is the map done with?"

Jack Sparrow nodded. His eyes were black as the night outside, and he was panting slightly; a brief diagnostic glance downwards showed Jack that his companion was still hard, and that thought sent a delightful frisson through his body as he thought of all the ways that Sparrow's situation might be alleviated. Though Shaftoe was not above teasing, himself.

"I'll return it, then," he said, getting to his feet and beaming down at Sparrow, still on his knees beside the bunk. "Back soon."

"One more thing, Jack, before you go," said Sparrow, and Jack was sure that he was about to ask for ... well, for a hand, or a quick fuck, or for Jack's mouth on him. None of which Jack had the slightest objection to. He pulled Jack Sparrow up against himself, reaching for the tie of Jack's breeches: but Sparrow stepped back, hands up to hold Jack away (though the look on his face said clearer than anything that this was not only temporary, but eminently negotiable).

"Their map's missing something," he said, grinning conspiratorially at Jack: and, dipping the tatty quill one last time (then fastidiously flicking ink from the nib, so that it splattered across the deck) he took the stolen map, and drew a doubled, wavering line south from the Orinoco to the oddly-shaped lake in the heartlands below it.

To Jack Shaftoe that lake resembled nothing so much as a beetle, river-legged and writhing on the paper; but as Sparrow blotted the new lines with his sleeve, and rubbed his grimy finger across them to blur and age them like the rest, he saw that invented water-course become a part (like Jack himself) of the fable that Jack Sparrow was constructing.

"There," said Sparrow. "Let's rewrite history."


	5. Mortal Hazards, Chapter Five

  
  
Jack Shaftoe came awake gradually from a dream of gold. Gold specie heaped high, gilded idols and icons, an aureate glow suffusing everything in sight, including Jack himself, so that it was as though he'd been dipped (Achilles-like) into a bath of cool molten metal, coated and armoured and covered with it. The gold burned in the most delightful of ways, a sensation that he'd never experienced before but which, he muzzily deduced, was proof that he was finally alive, after years of some illusory excuse for living.

Not all of this, it turned out, was a dream.

The golden light crept between his cracked-open eyelids, dazzling him, and gradually he began to recognise it as dawn-light, dappled and refracted on a bed of water. The _Black Pearl_ , captain's cabin, sunrise: now he remembered. They were anchored in the bay before a village whose name was either Guiria or Macuro (the people did not show a preference). The golden warmth that cocooned him was a buttery blend of morning sunlight and the body-heat of Captain Jack Sparrow, pressed tight against Jack's back, with -- "Oh, Christ, _Jack_..." -- his hot, slippery hands working their dextrous craft upon Jack's malleable body.

He was already hard (though a faint, not unpleasant burn reminded him that he'd spent himself repeatedly last night, not only in Sparrow's paradisiacal mouth but deep within his body) and Jack Sparrow's right hand was stroking and curving around his yard, thumb just _there_ against that sweet ache. And Sparrow's left hand was busily opening him up, preparing him for a bout of reciprocity, tricking Jack's body into giving up all its defences and letting Sparrow's glowing golden flesh (which Jack, his eyes not yet open, could nevertheless see quite clearly in his mind, and _feel_ more distinctly yet as it pressed against the cleft of his buttocks) push into him.

Jack wriggled sleepily, craving more of both hands at once, and at a loss as to the method of satisfying both cravings with a single movement.

"Didn't mean to wake you, love," murmured Jack Sparrow insincerely, hot mouth right next to Jack's ear.

Jack chuckled. Easy to turn his head slightly and let Sparrow's gilded mouth trace curlicues and ornaments across Jack's cheekbone and the hinge of his jaw. "Liar," he retorted.

"It's morning, and we sail today," said Sparrow conversationally, pushing another slippery digit into Jack's body and making him purr.

"'Twas morning, nearly, when our night's work was done," pointed out Jack, thrusting his hips forward into Sparrow's encircling hand, then back against that glorious (yet insufficient) pressure. "An' you've clearly woken me just to tease me, rather than actually oh Christ and all the saints, Jack, Jack, don't stop, oh ..."

For Sparrow, eminently predictable in these games, had risen to Jack's taunt, and was fucking him now, slow and tantalising, setting a rhythm that Jack could rock lazily back into, filling him up with golden light and glimmery darkness all at once, chanting a continuo of scandalous endearments beneath Jack's own prayerful litany.

When had this started to be something he craved? Why had he wasted all those years avoiding it? ("Because it wasn't glorious shining Jack Sparrow, Jack-o-mine, that offered it you," whispered the Imp gleefully, gambolling ecstatically in the metaphysickal golden void through which Jack was falling.) For now he wanted it to go on for ever; imagined years of it, years, with neither Sparrow nor himself growing one whit less live and vital, caught in their prime and preserved with energies and bodies and hearts and minds at their peak, caught just like this moment with Jack Sparrow's cock penetrating him at that sudden sharp angle (as Sparrow pulled Jack's hips back towards him, and Jack got his knee up to brace himself against the bulkhead, echoing each thrust and taking it ever more deeply), with Sparrow's words slurred together like tavern music played too fast by drunken fiddlers, murmuring compliments that would've shocked Jack if he'd believed a word of them, with Sparrow's lovely callused hand stroking Jack fast and rough and just off rhythm, enough to have him frantic with the need to have all of Jack Sparrow at once, right now, now, "oh, please now, Jack --"

Last night (his jaw still ached from it) he'd tasted Jack Sparrow's vital essence, drunk it down straight from the source, and shared the last of it, all sticky and salty and ammoniac, with Sparrow himself: and so Jack Shaftoe knew that the heat pouring into him did not resemble molten gold in any wise, save that vivid glowing heat that he could feel throughout his body. And his own effusion, spilling and gouting over Sparrow's pale palm, was not golden, either, but of a shimmering-creamy hue. Yet it seemed to him that, between the two of them, there was something rare and precious and worth more than silver or rubies or gold.

... Not that such treasure was to be cast aside lightly, though: for, long lives ahead of them both, 'twould be folly to live so long all hand-to-mouth, slaves to Fortuna.

"Jack," he said, once their hearts were beating regularly once more, and Jack Sparrow had unlocked their bodies from one another, "may we not have two treasures as easy as one?"

Jack Sparrow's mouth was against Jack's throat, where he had been tasting Jack's sweat. "What's on your mind?" he murmured, and Jack's skin vibrated with it.

"We've the map, now," said Jack, and he could not help grinning to himself for the sheer derring-do of it. Laughably easy, to be honest, though Jack played down the ease of it, even in the story he was weaving for himself, in favour of his own courage and cleverness. There was a supporting role for Lady Luck, since she'd kept the _Gloriana_ 's crew from noting his wet footprints on their deck, or the splashing noises as he'd slipped back into the sparkly-dark ocean again, muscles aching, for the last swim of the night. Walter had stirred in his sleep as Jack'd slid the map-case back under his bunk -- not quite where he'd found it, but close enough -- but, though he'd made some inarticulate noise, he'd slumbered on: and Jack had made a clean escape.

Now he reminded Jack Sparrow of that map -- the fair copy of that map, without the chimerical rivers that Sparrow'd added to Walter's original -- and set his hand above Sparrow's heart as he spoke.

"It's not far, Jack -- ten or eleven days' march, and less by boat: I could hire a boat right here, and take a few of the men -- Tom Cox, maybe, and Joe, and --"

Sparrow's semenacious hand descended upon Jack's mouth, closing off his words. Jack could not (and did not try to) resist a lick at the salty tang of it, but the hand was not playing: it pressed harder, fingers nudging at the join of his jaw.

"You'll do no such thing, savvy?" said Jack Sparrow, every quiet word distinct and saw-edged. The cabin seemed abruptly darker, as though a cloud had covered the sun, though the morning light was undimmed.

After the first shock of it, Jack's contrary humours surged forth. He reached up fast and prised Sparrow's hand from his mouth.

"Says who?"

"Says I," said Jack Sparrow, lying beside him naked and sweaty and reeking of everything they had done, but somehow a thousand miles away and above and beyond. "Your captain."

* * *

"The _Gloriana_ 's weighed anchor, Captain," said Bill as Jack emerged from below, blinking. "She's heading up-river."

"Aye?" said Jack, directing a black look first at his mate, and then at the busy deck of the other ship. He took the glass from his pocket, extended it, and peered at the _Gloriana_ more closely. Busy enough, yes, with the business of raising sail and stowing goods -- there was a chicken, loose from her coop, scuttling around the poop deck -- but there was no sign of panic or outrage. Perhaps, after all, they'd not noticed Jack Shaftoe's muddle-headed theft.

"What's amiss, Captain?" said Bill, frowning at him.

"I'll tell you once we're underway," said Jack. "Which, if it's all right with these fine gentlemen," gesturing at the variously lounging, splicing, dicing, hung over and smugly sober members of the _Black Pearl_ 's company, "I'd really rather like to be today, or failing that by the end of the week. Are we all aboard, gents?" he cried.

There came the usual ragged chorus of assent. If any were missing, their mates weren't too bothered, and there was no outcry when Jack gave orders to raise the anchor. He kept one eye on the capstan-crew, with their vexing little whistle, and one on the _Gloriana_. The wind was from the south-east, and she was making heavy weather of turning her head south-west, toward the mouth of the river that debouched into the little bay.

Jack had no intention of monitoring Jack Shaftoe's activities, but he was instantly aware -- with every fibre, so it seemed, of his being -- when Shaftoe, in his turn, came up the stairs and into the light. Shaftoe's expression was carefully blank, and he did not look at Jack.

Bill Turner did. Bill, of course, noticed everything; he'd spent years looking out for (some said looking after) his captain, and it was futile to hope that he would not notice a shift in this particular balance. Jack could tell that Bill was trying to catch his eye, dying to ask what had changed -- though possibly that gossipy curiosity was tempered by the dread of being _told_ , in unwelcome detail, the details of his captain's entanglements (emotional and physical) with Mr Jack Shaftoe -- but Jack was not ready, yet, to have that discussion. Instead he snapped out orders -- anchor weighed, cables stowed, sails hoisted and trimmed, that bloody idiot Stone out of sight if he was going to heave up his guts -- and took the helm. Jack Shaftoe did his work as competently as ever; no, to be fair, he'd improved since he'd come aboard a month ago. He went aloft willingly to reef the mainsail as they picked up the sea-wind beyond the headland, and since Jack had promised himself not to watch Mr Shaftoe like some fond fool, he did not allow himself to notice that Shaftoe had not come down again.

"What's our course, Captain?" Bill asked him, once they were well out from the land and running before the wind, towards the Serpent's Mouth.

"Port o' Spain," said Jack. "Give the lads a couple of nights to make merry and drink themselves senseless, not that _that_ 'll take long -- some pleasurable company to waste the last of their money on -- and we can lay in some more stores."

"And then what?" asked Bill. The two of them were at the wheel, Jack steering (or, rather, keeping one hand on the _Pearl_ , gentling her, while she steered herself) and Bill with his back to the deck. No one was within earshot, though there'd been a couple of idlers that Bill'd glared at until they moved for'ard. "We need another prize --"

"Mr Turner," said Jack, swivelling round to face Bill. "Do I seem a fool, to you?"

"No, Jack, but --"

"I've spoken to you already," said Jack, leaning close, "of that Spanish Don and his precious treasure, aye?"

"You have," said Bill, with resignation.

"And you know I've the means and method of finding it, aye?"

"Aye."

"Or perhaps --" Jack put his head back, stroking his beard, frowning theatrically, and Bill scowled. "Perhaps, Mr Turner, you don't believe a word of it, and you'd rather go after some mythical golden city in the heart of the jungle?"

Bill looked blank; and he was not actor enough for Jack to disbelieve his expression.

"You were in the tavern last night, surely?" he said anyway. "Hearing those fine fellows from the _Gloriana_ , and their wonderful quest for El Dorado?"

Bill snorted. "Oh, aye. _That's_ the golden city you mean?"

"Aye," said Jack.

"I heard of a lot of wild goose chases," said Bill, chuckling, "but I never heard of any that came back from El Dorado."

Jack scowled; but this was no time to discuss family history. "They had a map," he said.

"A map?" Bill's smile faded. "'Had', you say."

"They've a map still," said Jack, holding Bill's gaze. "But it might not show quite the same waters and ways that it did when Mr Shaftoe brought it to me last night."

He watched Bill (who was not a stupid man) digest this news.

"You made him take it back," Bill said at last.

"Aye," said Jack.

"But you altered it: and you made a copy, did you not, Captain Sparrow?"

"I did," affirmed Jack, with an approving smile.

"And Mr Shaftoe wants that map," said Bill, who was not smiling now.

Jack did not say anything.

"Nay, Mr Shaftoe wants to hunt that treasure for himself," guessed Bill, watching his captain carefully for signs of rage, resignation or confirmation.

"Mr Shaftoe," said Jack heavily, glancing to left and to right in case the ship's company -- or, far worse, treacherous Jack Shaftoe -- had crept up on the two of them, "wants to take my crew and seek out El Dorado."

"'Tis not mutiny, Jack," warned Bill Turner, reaching out to touch his captain's arm but plainly thinking better of it.

"No," said Jack, with a brittle laugh. "Indeed, it _cannot_ be mutiny; for, as Mr Shaftoe reminded me not two hours ago, he's never sworn his oath or set his name to the Articles."

"Oh Christ," said Bill.

"You asked me what Jack Shaftoe was," said Jack Sparrow, bitter and flat-eyed. "You have your answer, Mr Turner." The _Black Pearl_ thrummed with life beneath his hand, and even that reminded --

"You have the helm, Mr Turner," said Jack, and took himself below.

* * *

The wind was in their favour, and the sail to Trinidad's northernmost port was two days and a night of fair weather. During this time Jack Shaftoe did not care to return to the captain's cabin: nor did he sling his hammock on the gun-deck with the rest of the crew, as he'd done when first they'd come aboard from the foundering sugar-ship. He spent much of his time in the foretop, gazing out blindly into the blue air, rehearsing thoughts and arguments and memories and trying very hard not to think of (or look for) Jack Sparrow.

"Because I'm your captain," had said Jack Sparrow -- words to that effect, anyway -- as though none of the rest of it'd ever happened; as though Jack were there in his bed, and somehow beholden to him, because of some _duty_ or _rank_ or _pragmatism_. As though the golden glow that had poured over and through and throughout the two of them, moments before, was no more than some alchemist's fairground advertisement.

"Ah," Jack'd said, hoping to tease Sparrow out of this cold harsh mood, "but you're not my captain, Captain Sparrow, save for here, between the two of us, when you master me." Saying it had made him blush -- as did the thought of it, now, curled up alone in the draughty mizzen top while the green-crusted coastline of some gleaming island drew nearer, and with it Jack Shaftoe's future and the necessity of making plans. He'd blushed, and yet he'd looked Jack Sparrow in the eye, and not tried to pretend that it was anything less than what it was.

And Sparrow had looked at him with that hard, metallic gaze -- if metal could be black as coal -- and said, "If you're not with me, Jack, you're --"

"Not with you?" Jack had cried, and he had torn himself free from Sparrow's embrace: though there'd been little embrace to tear himself _from_ , if truth be told, only Jack Sparrow's arm lying heavy on his waist. "What, and all this counts for nothing? For it's true I've not made my mark against your Articles -- I'd've done it if I hadn't been recruited to the King's Navy, but you ain't asked since -- but if you think that's all that binds the pair of us, why, then you're a fool, Jack Sparrow."

And Jack Sparrow had lain there looking, staring, at him: and at last, all blank and unreadable, had said only, "Aye."

 

 

Jack'd slept last night curled in a nook behind the galley, where it was warm (though never as warm as Jack Sparrow's bunk). He had not slept well, though he'd been awake for much of the previous night. Now, setting foot on the solid, filthy ground of the quay at Port o' Spain, he vowed his first aim would be the finding of a bed that did not rock and sway.

For Jack Sparrow, after all, had not asked him to stay: had not spoken one word to him since yesterday morning.

Jack struck out for the back of the town, away from the harbour: he'd no desire to encounter any of the _Black Pearl_ 's company, some of who'd been giving him odd looks this afternoon. There was a tavern at the foot of a hill, a nasty-looking place with a sagging roof; but there was a pretty dark-skinned lass carrying a jug of ale from table to table, and when Jack Shaftoe smiled at her she smiled back.

The ale was surprisingly palatable, though darker and sweeter than Jack was used to, and the other customers, though eyeing Jack (bedecked with cutlass, map-case and a coat that was too heavy for the humid evening) appraisingly, left him in peace and did not make overmuch noise. Jack'd become accustomed to peace and quiet, those last two days in the mizzen top, and he'd yet to finish thinking everything through.

He had the map to El Dorado; Jack Sparrow had not wanted it, and it'd been Jack who'd dared to steal it (and acquiesced in the return of the original, though he didn't care one way or another for Walter and his hopes). Sparrow wouldn't use it, and Jack was determined that _he_ would.

Returning many months from now, laden with gold and carrying a secret infinitely more valuable, perhaps he would find that Jack Sparrow was waiting for him, ready to unsay (or at least to pretend not said) those ice-sharp words of loyalty and duty and the like. Perhaps once he'd proven himself to Sparrow -- or, better yet, once they'd each a treasure of their own --

"More for you, fine sir?" said the girl. She was lithe and dark-skinned, with teeth whiter than anyone Jack had ever met, and she was smiling warmly at Jack.

"Aye, love," said Jack. It was more or less instinct that made him catch her about the waist and pull her down upon his lap, but the effect was remarkably enjoyable. She wriggled and squealed, still smiling, and Jack was reminded of the last girl he'd had in his lap, who had not been a girl at all.

Faintly disgusted at himself (for a mess of reasons including, but not limited to, sodomy, giving of; sodomy, receiving of; sentimental attachment; naive trustfulness; inability to stop thinking of Jack Sparrow; unnatural passivity when confronted with a lapful of warm, giggling, wriggling female; slight nausea deriving from the ale, and the phant'sied rocking of the room) Jack wrapped both his arms around the girl and squeezed. Skinny little thing, but there was a nice pair of tits on her -- Christ, Jack missed breasts -- and her soft, curvaceous bottom was pressing against his groin in a most intriguing way.

"Was going to ask," he whispered in her ear, "if there was somewhere a weary man could lay his head for the night."

"Why ain't you goin' to ask no more?"

"Not feeling so weary now," said Jack, grinning, and leaned in to kiss her.


	6. Mortal Hazards, Chapter Six

  
  
The harbour at Port o' Spain was as crowded and noisy as the taverns along the quay where the _Black Pearl_ 's unruly crew were roistering and raising hell. The notorious Jack Sparrow, _Captain_ Jack Sparrow (a title that looked to've cost him a great deal lately, but hard-won and not lightly given up), was not amongst them on this occasion, having elected to remain on board his lovely ship and drink in solitary, melancholy splendour. A skeleton crew stayed with him, made up of miscreants and misers, but they were all nervous of Jack Sparrow's sudden black mood: though they were, Jack was sure, gossiping like a gaggle of whores about its cause, the precipitous and unannounced departure of Mr Jack Shaftoe.

Shaftoe hadn't stopped to say farewell to anyone. Almost as soon as the _Black Pearl_ 's heavy anchors had settled to the seabed, Jack Shaftoe had appeared on deck, cutlass hung at his side and a brass-bound map-case slung over his shoulder. Jack had known what was in it, though of course Shaftoe had not actually _asked_ before taking the bloody map from Jack's cabin. Never mind: Jack never wanted to see it again. What use to it, anyway, without ... And anyway, Jack had something better.

He'd stared hard at Shaftoe, willing him to look round and meet Jack's gaze, to come over and apologise, or argue, or explain: anything, anything. But Shaftoe'd simply hailed one of the watermen who plied the harbour. Within a minute he'd been over the side and down in the man's little boat, never a word to anyone at all: and Bill had been staring, aghast, long after Jack Sparrow'd turned his back.

"You're letting him go?"

"I'm not stopping him from leaving, Mr Turner," Jack'd snapped.

Bootstrap had frowned at him. "Then you'll catch up with him ashore?"

"As a matter of fact," said Jack, "I think I'll just stay here with my _Pearl_."

"Fair enough," said Bill. "Actually, I reckon that's a grand idea: I'll keep you company, if --"

"You'll go ashore, Mr Turner," Jack Sparrow had said icily. "Contrary to whatever improbable ideas you've acquired of late, I don't need a wet-nurse, or a chaperone; and I'm entirely happy to have a peaceful night away from those as reckon they know my mind."

Which had been enough, with the sneer, to make Bill Turner -- usually the most even-tempered and reasonable of fellows -- mutter an oath at his captain and stamp away.

Now it was morning, horribly early morning (as golden and glowing as the other day, when he'd woken -- 'for the last time,' Jack told himself grimly, like a man prodding at a wound to see how it's healing -- next to glorious naked Jack Shaftoe, and proceeded to fuck him hard and slow), and Jack could not sleep. He stretched out in the bunk, smelling the combined scents of Shaftoe and himself on the dirty linen, and scowled up at the black wood of the ceiling. The _Pearl_ rocked him slowly and gently, easing away the ache: but Jack's head hurt anew from the rum in which, last night, he'd drowned the repeating rosary of the events leading to Shaftoe's departure, and the warm buttery light made him think again of that light sliding over Jack Shaftoe's skin.

Jack's hand, he found, was on his cock, which was clearly also remembering Jack Shaftoe. Foolish to let his mind linger on one lost lover: it was hardly as though he'd never had another. (Jack suppressed the small taunting voice that said, "Never one that was his match!": Shaftoe's damned Imp, no doubt, left by its master to torment him.) He stroked himself with grim efficiency, as though it were a chore, and tried not to remember the wonderful strong heat of Shaftoe's body as he took Jack, and took him, and took him --

If Jack's mood had been bad before, it was now positively vile. He cleaned himself off: better, really, to bathe, and perhaps after that to burn everything that carried Shaftoe's scent. Oh god, that shirt of his, that Jack'd worn until it smelt only of himself. Once before he'd thought that Shaftoe'd run off and left him, and been, oh, so happy to find it not so. Now he _knew_ it, and wished he could forget.

"I'm going ashore," he informed a bleary-eyed Ragetti, who was managing, barely, to keep watch on the _Pearl_ 's anchor-chains. "Mr Turner'll be back soon: tell him I've business in town."

"Aye," muttered Ragetti, who had been more than usually sullen since that night in Macuro with the damned treasure-hunters. He'd nearly been caught eavesdropping on their secret conversations, and Jack had saved his sorry hide. What a waste.

"Mr Ragetti," snapped Jack, "if you don't care for the company on the _Black Pearl_ , feel free to find another ship."

"What, like 'e did?" said Ragetti, leering.

It was too irresistibly easy a target: Jack's blow left Ragetti hunched over, red blood plashing from his nose onto the clean black deck.

"And clear up that mess, mate!" Jack called over his shoulder, clambering down into the little row-boat that'd been left by the others when they'd gone ashore last night. Punching Ragetti had done a little to assuage his temper: the sheer physical work of rowing helped, too.

In truth Jack Sparrow had no clear business in Port o' Spain, but for the first time in his life he was beginning to feel pent-up and 'prisoned on board ship. His cabin was worst -- he'd air and fumigate it later on, and find fresh bedding down in the hold -- but everything reminded him of Jack Shaftoe, who'd been on board for a scant month, and yet had imprinted his image on each familiar board and stay and yard.

No clear business, he had claimed, and had almost convinced himself: but when he set foot on the uneven flagstones of the quay, Jack found himself peering at the line of dinghies and coracles and gigs, trying to find the one that'd brought Jack Shaftoe ashore last night.

Enough. Jack Shaftoe had demonstrably come ashore: now where (not that Jack cared) would he go?

As far from the waterside as he could, decided Jack, so as to avoid the _Black Pearl_ 's crew with their careless camaraderie and their lewd jokes (which Shaftoe'd always taken in good spirit) about Jack Shaftoe's nightly celebrations. Shaftoe, too, would surely want to be away from everything and everyone that might remind him of the way things had been. If he cared: and Jack thought that he did.

Jack Sparrow pushed his hat further back on his head, and jangled the shillings in his pocket, and made himself smile an amiable smile. He'd questions to ask, and decent, God-fearing folk to charm. And he'd leave until later (when he might give an honest answer) the question he needed to ask himself: why not simply let him go?

 

 

It took Jack Sparrow until mid-morning to find the tavern at the foot of the hill, with its pretty dark-eyed wench who eyed him so suspiciously at first; who giggled, in a way that made rage rise in Jack's heart, when he asked after the tall blond Englishman.

"And where's he got to, love?" said Jack, grinding his teeth ferociously at the thought of Shaftoe with this woman (the thought of Shaftoe, indeed, with _anyone_ ) and letting her see the glint of gold in his hand.

There was a heavy curtain across the window of the upstairs room, keeping out both light and air: but when Jack opened the door a beam of sunlight fell across the bed, and Shaftoe stirred and stretched, eyes still closed, and smiled in his sleep.

"That's him," whispered Jack to the lass: and, when she said nothing, "just leave us to it, love: nothing terrible's going to happen, you have my word of honour."

He hoped he was telling the truth.

Finally, finally, she retreated, and Jack could shut the door behind him, and stand there, and just stare at Jack Shaftoe, marvelling at how much it hurt. He tried to hold onto the rage, and the sheer _annoyance_ at having to go traipsing all over this hot, dusty town -- worse than bloody Stabroek -- in search of Jack Shaftoe. Rage was better than this appalling ache.

"Come back," murmured Shaftoe sleepily, and Jack almost forgot how to breathe: but Shaftoe's eyes were still closed, and anyway the room was dark. It hadn't been Jack he'd meant.

At the moment, though, that mattered not at all.

* * *

He'd been dreaming, or possibly just floating through memories of his time aboard the _Black Pearl_ : at any rate, it had been so much more vivid and luscious and lascivious than last night. Not that there'd been much wrong with the lass, who'd made him feel royally welcome as she invited him into her arms, into her bed, into ... well, into _her_. And Jack Shaftoe, never prone to false modesty, liked to think that he'd been thoroughly appreciative, not to mention _appreciated_ ; ah, women, so soft and sweet and predictably tender, gurgling with laughter if you touched 'em just _there_ , all shivery and sighing if you used your tongue _there_. All those lovely parts that he'd almost forgotten in a brief month's absence from the practices of heterosexuality -- practices he'd been perfecting since he was old enough to go halves on a girl, and skills in which he took justifiable pride -- all designed by God and Nature to arouse and excite and overwhelm any man. Jack'd found himself less weary than he'd thought, and the girl (had he asked her name? He didn't recall it) had been eager and supple and inventive, like --

But he wasn't in the business of comparisons, and 'twas unfair to think of another lover while he was still in the girl's bed: and anyway, that lover would be his no more: and maybe, maybe (here Jack shushed the voice that called him liar) another round would take his mind off sharper, newer joys. A nice slow morning fuck, with the girl doing all the work, writhing above him as he rocked her ...

He reached out blindly, but she wasn't in bed any more. He could hear her breathing, though, he was sure of it: she hadn't gone far. "Come back," Jack murmured, stretching again, feeling his prick beginning to swell.

Then, oh, then there was a hard familiar body pressed against him, pinning him to the damp warm mattress, and a devilish mouth against his pulse, and a heavy, clothed, muscular weight -- not at all soft or yielding -- atop him, and, "Aye, Jack, I will," whispered fiercely next to his ear.

He was still dreaming, or Jack Sparrow was dreaming him. Slightly afraid and vastly excited, Jack writhed up against the pirate, hardening with dizzying rapidity, trying to force his eyes open and seeing only darkness, but oh sharp teeth at his jugular, and the press of a hard, hot cock against his belly through, damn it, clothes: Jack pulled his hand free from Sparrow's grip (relieved to find that he _could_ ) and began to pull at the buttons. "Jack, oh, Jack," his voice was saying, over and over, like a village idiot.

"I can taste her," whispered Jack Sparrow. "I can taste her on you." Rocking against Jack Shaftoe's palm, tongue tracing the curve of Jack's throat, lying heavy on top of him and not letting him move.

"You --" began Jack Shaftoe, in exquisite anguish, for what could possibly come of all this?

"You," breathed Sparrow, trailing his tongue down the meridian of Jack's chest.

Jack could see now -- Sparrow's dark hair had been across his eyes, compounding the gloom -- and his breath caught at the sight of Jack Sparrow looking back, staring back at him, triumphantly reckless, that mouth on Jack's own skin, cleverer than a hundred whores, let alone a single tavern-girl. "Jack," he said helplessly, nauseous with glad surprise, still fumbling with the buttons of Sparrow's breeches; and Sparrow pulled back abruptly, so that Jack thought he'd done something amiss (snagged a hair, or pressed too hard) until he felt Sparrow's mouth on his prick.

Jack cried out: he could not help himself, and anyway, from the way that Sparrow's lips stretched around him in a wicked smirk, this was exactly the desired response. Sparrow's tongue swirled around the flare of his cock-head, teasing and tasting, and he lifted his head for a moment to murmur mockingly, "God, Jack, she tastes lovely; you must've --"

Then a flurry of events all occurred at once, or so it seemed to Jack (still half-asleep after, it must be said, a busy night). The door swung open, spilling bright greenish dappled light into the room and over the two of them: Marguerite (he remembered now) yelped with surprise, and then began to berate the two of them in an unpunctuated shriek: Jack Sparrow sat back on his heels, ostentatiously licking his lips (Jack moaned), and looked over his shoulder at her: and somewhere outside the dogs began to bark.

Jack Shaftoe, in a state of acute arousal that was further complicated by emotional confusion, began to laugh helplessly. Sparrow was answering back -- "It's not that I mind sharing, love: but _him_ , not _you_..." -- and Marguerite, poor dear lass, was crying; though, wait, those were tears of rage, not distress.

"Time to go, mate," said Jack Sparrow to him, and sprang to his feet in a single fluid motion, just in time to encounter the palm of Marguerite's hand, which produced a satisfying noise as it connected with his cheek.

Jack would've sympathised, but he was too much engaged in locating and donning his various garments, hopping on one leg rather than bringing himself within range of the shrieking Marguerite and her powerful backhander. 'Twas hardly the first time anyone had slapped Jack Sparrow -- indeed, Jack was as sympathetic to the _urge_ as he was to the _injury_ \-- and Sparrow did not really seem to mind it overmuch. He was laying claim, extravagantly and in almost legal detail, to Jack Shaftoe, and Marguerite's interjections were becoming fainter. Jack fastened his shirt, picked up the cutlass and that damned map-case, and slung his coat over his shoulder.

"Here, love," he said, as Sparrow paused for breath. He ducked around the pirate, bussed Marguerite smartly on the cheek: then swayed back to avoid the inevitable reprisal, caught her wrist and, turning her hand, pressed a handful of coins into her open palm. "You were grand company, love," he said; then, to Jack Sparrow, "Time to go."

He went down the stairs ahead of Sparrow, not looking back: but as soon as they were outside in the street, he spun and caught Sparrow by the shoulders, pushing him back against the splintery wooden side of the tavern.

The dogs were still barking, but they were nowhere in sight. Perhaps they were guarding the tavern's front door, or the warehouse up the street. Jack Sparrow looked up at him, and said nothing; nothing, at least, with his mouth, but his whole body pressed hard (some parts of it harder than others) against Jack's, and that mouth was open and inviting, and Jack was desperate to feel it upon him again: but not here, not where any other interruption might irrupt.

Jack kissed him hard, tasting himself and Marguerite on Sparrow's lips; he wanted Sparrow to remove every trace of her from his body, but did not know how to ask. Sparrow was holding onto him as though they were drowning; it was the way that Jack was holding him, too, and this kiss was fierce and fiery and desperate and honest, as though it had been months or miles between them.

"Jack," said Jack Shaftoe, breaking the kiss and staring unblinkingly into that dark gaze. "You told her I was yours."

"And are you not?" said Sparrow, mouth curving: but there was something almost panicked in the widening of his eyes.

"Aye, Jack," said Jack Shaftoe: and waited until Sparrow smiled before he kissed him again. "I'm yours if you'll be mine."

* * *

Jack Sparrow did not carry a mirror with him, but he'd have wagered that Shaftoe's face was sufficient reflection of his own hungry expression. The way that Shaftoe was looking at him -- had been looking at him all the time that Jack'd been rowing, fast as he could, back to the _Black Pearl_ \-- made Jack shiver with everything that it implied.

There was too much still unsaid, and Jack was not fool enough to imagine that this heat between them would burn away lesser concerns. Neither he nor Shaftoe had yet spoken of Shaftoe's departure, nor of what had driven Jack to seek him out, nor of what (what?) had brought Shaftoe back with him, unresisting and unargumentative.

Shaftoe went up the ladder first, beaming that broad smug smile at Ragetti (who gave him a sour look in return) and heading below as though he'd never been away.

"Business, eh, Captain?" said Ragetti to Jack, sniggering. Jack was gratified to note that there was still blood on his face. He did not bother with a reply, for already Shaftoe would be at the cabin door -- nay, _in_ the cabin, he'd proved again and again that neither lock nor law was any prevention -- and Jack longed to be alone with him.

Yet when they were sprawled together on the bunk, Jack paused, and waited until Shaftoe shoved impatiently against him.

"'Tis not just this, Jack," he said softly, knowing it for the first true thing he'd said today. "'Tis much more than just this."

"Aye," said Shaftoe thickly, swallowing and plucking at Jack's clothes.

"I c'n taste her still," Jack said cheerfully after a little while, with Shaftoe heaving and writhing afresh under his hands and his mouth. He swirled his tongue around Shaftoe's cock-head once more, and smacked his lips. "But not to worry, Jack," and he lifted his head, just for the feeling of Shaftoe's fingers tightening in his hair. "For since _I_ no longer have the dress, it's only natural that you'd seek out someone who does have one."

"Oh, Christ, you in that dress, Jack, I swear I've never seen anything finer," Shaftoe managed, half-laughing and utterly breathless with it, and then -- as Jack's hand cupped his tightening balls -- with the climax that overtook him and poured him out into Jack's greedy mouth. And then, once he was breathing enough to speak again, "you've no notion of the things I long to do to you, Jack."

"Tell me, then," said Jack Sparrow, unable to think of anything except the ache of desire he felt for Shaftoe, all flushed and bright-eyed and giving off energy and passion like a new sun.

"I'd settle myself thus," said Shaftoe, hauling himself upright, "and have you on my knee --"

"Like a tavern whore?" said Jack pointedly, arching back against Shaftoe's chest, one leg propped against the lid of his sea-chest to give Shaftoe's sure hand room to move.

"Oh, better, better than any tavern wench," Shaftoe assured him, either missing the sharpness or paying it no heed. "I'd have you thus, and then I'd slide my hand up underneath the skirt, and up, and up, and _there_..."

His fingers were slick from something, and Jack could feel Shaftoe's prick hardening anew against his arse as Shaftoe began to open him up: and it was a matter of most desperate urgency to be filled and fucked and taken, to last until Shaftoe was right inside him, taking and claiming and making him his own.

"Oh Jack," Shaftoe was saying, words blurring against Jack's damp shoulder, rocking him forward until the long hot line of his cock pressed against the swell of Jack's arse. "One lifetime ain't enough for all I want from you, with you, in oh god in you."

In him: and Jack, groaning and spreading his legs wider to take more, more, wanted more, wanted Jack Shaftoe, wanted this vast silent explosion in his heart -- and its counterpart low in his belly, oh heavens _there_ \-- to go on until Judgement Day.


	7. Mortal Hazards, Chapter Seven

  
  
It was sunset, and the _Pearl_ had swung round on the ebb tide until her stern faced west, and ruby-coloured light slanted in, as from a stained-glass window in a cathedral, over the two of them. Jack Shaftoe lay, sweating, and luxuriated in the heat and glow of Jack Sparrow's lithe body bent around his own.

Sparrow was asleep, snoring very slightly, but there was still a gleeful smile upon his face, and Jack smiled too to see it there. He felt dizzy and euphoric, as though he'd been cast adrift and floated, fallen, off the edge of the world: and there found a whole other world, where the air was full of opiate vapours, or the water was rum disguis'd, or -- or some vast new difference that he did not know.

No need to go back; not that he thought he could. Even Marguerite (Jack smiled reminiscently, for after all she'd been sweet and generous and soft all through last night) had been proof of that. And now --

A spasm of cold reality shivered through him; and then Jack Sparrow's warm hand tightened on his waist, and Jack Sparrow's pyretic mouth stretched against Jack's skin.

"Wha's afoot?"

"Nothing," said Jack. "Nothing. Just --"

But the pirate was awake, and his two hands, stretched to cover and claim as much of Jack's skin as he could, must feel the tension in Jack's whole body.

"Tide's still on the ebb," murmured Sparrow against Jack's throat, eyes closing. "An' all but a handful of the crew ashore."

Jack tried to make sense of this, and at first could not: but then he realised that Sparrow was talking about the imminent departure -- watered and victualled and armed against all manner of ill fortune -- of the _Black Pearl_ , sailing from Port o' Spain for some mysterious island that Jack Sparrow thought held the secret to eternal life.  
  
"Just tell me," said Jack Shaftoe stonily, "when you want me to go ashore."

Sparrow's eyes were shut, tightly shut, and (though he turned his face against Jack's collarbone to hide it) he was grimacing. He mumbled something, plaintive and so indistinct that Jack couldn't make it out: couldn't believe that it had been what he thought he'd heard.

"Jack," he said softly, in case he _had_ heard aright, "I won't leave if you don't wish it."

"I shan't keep you," said Sparrow softly, his eyes still shut. "If you want --"

"I don't want to go," Jack said vehemently. He rolled over (no easy manoeuvre in this narrow bunk) and leaned over Jack Sparrow, frowning, with his hands bracketing the pirate's head: which, at least, made Sparrow open his eyes. "Or are you sending me away?"

"You bloody left, mate!"

"I came back, din't I?"

"Only because I came and found you. You'd never have come back else."

Jack hesitated. On the one hand, he could contradict Jack Sparrow, and argue (with alarming honesty) that he'd have been drawn back helplessly -- like a pin to a lodestone -- to the _Black Pearl_ and her cruel, mistrustful, wondrous captain. On the other hand, Sparrow was smiling up at him now, that broad sharp-edged smile that boded all manner of misbehaviour; and Jack Shaftoe preferred to keep his honesty for when it was truly needed.

"Well, mate," he said cockily, "I knew you'd come after me."

Sparrow's eyes were half-lidded, dark and impenetrable, and for a moment Jack was sure he'd said the wrong thing: and was appalled by the hollow hungry feeling that was blooming somewhere in his chest.

"Well," said Sparrow, "since you've no notion of looking after yourself, on --"

"What, I'm as --"

"-- on land _or_ on sea, then I thought --"

It was unclear to Jack who'd won that fall; but, twisted around Jack Sparrow and kissing him -- or perhaps _being kissed_ \-- hard (a distinction without a difference) he felt no further urge to continue the argument, or rather non-argument.

"Another week," said Jack Sparrow, breathing hard, with his beaded and bedizened hair tickling Jack's neck, and sticking to his mouth. "'Tis only a week to the Isle, Jack; stay with me 'til then."

"Only one more week?" said Jack, dismayed.

"A week, aye, or eternity," reassured Jack Sparrow, hand tightening on Jack's shoulder. "Or ..."

But the word was too big, and it hung between them, eclipsing everything else; Bob and the Imp and Tom Cox, good rum and ripe oranges, Bootstrap, Spanish treasure-ships, the way Marguerite had touched him, the Fountain of Youth, the sun and moon and wheeling planets and the pinpricked stars. Everything except Jack Sparrow, and the solemn panic in his eyes; Jack Sparrow, uncharacteristically and Biblically struck dumb by 'eternity'.

"Then tell me," said Jack Shaftoe slowly, lingering on each word lest he lose his meaning with the next, "what awaits us there."

"Us?" pounced Jack Sparrow, eyes ferally red in the last of the light.

"Aye," said Jack. "You and I."

* * *

Jack Sparrow tilted back his head and smiled like a martyr snatched up to Heaven. Jack Shaftoe was his -- or, at least, was prepared to believe him, to follow Sparrow rather than his own (or his Imp's) mad quest -- and Jack had, unlooked-for, another seven days, until the full moon, to bring Shaftoe to a magical, dreadful, wondrous place: not the Isla de Muerta, or whatever Don Guimaraes had called it, but this place where Jack found himself, or at least his heart.

He swallowed, and licked a long salty trail along Jack Shaftoe's twitching, muscular, vigorous arm. It was getting dark, but perhaps this was a tale for darkness. For Jack knew that he must indeed tell Shaftoe the whole story; by bringing Shaftoe back to his ship, his bed, his heart, he'd acknowledged him as an equal, and thus entitled in all sorts of ways to everything that Jack owned.

"Remember that old compass, Jack?" he said.

"That compass you tried to tell me wasn’t broken?" said Shaftoe; then, with a slow alluring smile that stole the thoughts out of Jack's mind, "The one that pointed at me?"

"Aye," said Jack huskily. "Well, that'll lead us to an island, called by the Spanish Isla de Muerta -- which, Jack," as Shaftoe opened his mouth to interrupt, "is indeed to say Isle of Death: but those Spanish soldiers who landed there didn't have Don Guimaraes an' his clever cunning ways with the old Aztecs and their codices."

Jack Shaftoe shrugged deliciously. "But you've Don G's notes, is that right? And you've teased out his meaning and everything he knew?"

Jack nodded: he could not help looking a little smug. Shaftoe laughed at him.

"So what shall we find there, Jack? Dead Spanish soldiers?"

"The gold of Cortez," said Jack, sitting back and gesturing impressively. Damn the gloom. He knelt up and lit the lamp, trying not to notice the oh-so-casual brush of Shaftoe's hand against the long taut muscle in his thigh. It was difficult to ignore: difficult to pretend that this man did not affect him, every moment, every way. But Jack had a tale to tell.

"The gold of Cortez," he resumed, settling back down atop Jack Shaftoe, unable to resist grinding his hips against Jack's, just a little.

"Gold," Shaftoe reminded him, hand covering half Jack's face, fingers fiddling with a gilded bead, and thumb notching the corner of his mouth.

"Cortez had a treasure -- stolen from the Aztecs, o'course, but he'd brought it all through the jungle and loaded it onro his little ships, and then he brought it to Isle de Muerta and ... and left it there, safe, for his return."

"I heard he died," said Jack Shaftoe, hands still now on Jack's waist. "Why'd he leave it there? Did your old Don not write that in his books?"

"That Aztec gold," said Jack, "carries the magic of the heathen gods. It holds the key to eternity, or so they said. Any man --"

"Then why din't Cortez keep it for himself?"

"He was coming back for it," said Jack impatiently, "but he was slain before he could return. Think of it, though, Jack: all that gold, waiting for us, and all that _time_ ..."

This concept, more than his mental image of the gold, was liable to send Jack Sparrow into an awed silence. Centuries unfolding before him; endless, literally endless days of sun and sea and open water, and arguing with Jack Shaftoe, and making peace with him, and making --

"There's a catch," said Jack Shaftoe flatly. "There has to be."

"Now, let's not be so cynical and doubting, Jack. Why d'you say that?"

"Cortez lived hundreds of years ago --"

"He's been dead a century and a half."

"And yet no one else's thought to come along and make himself immortal, easy as kiss my hand?"

Jack shook his head vigorously, as much for the way that it sent dark snaky lamplight-shadows flying over Shaftoe's naked chest as to contradict him. "NO one'd dug up the Don's precious little compass," he said, "and the maps and the codex hadn't been touched practic'lly since Cortez' day. I can't see how any man would've found the Isle."

"And what of Cortez' men? If they were anything like the blokes in the regiment, they'd be at it like rats in a grain-sack. You'll be lucky if there's a single bloody coin left."

"Well," said Jack, "this isn’t ordinary gold, savvy? It's magical --"

Jack Shaftoe made a rude noise, and Jack grinned down at him.

"It's magical gold: faery gold if you please, you bein' of Irish -- ow, let go, Jack, I din't mean it!" Jack Sparrow recomposed himself, and shook and shrugged everything back into place. "There's a trick to seeing it as it truly is," he added, helpfully.

"My old ma used to tell stories like that," said Shaftoe thoughtfully. Jack had never heard him mention his childhood before. "Faery gold that turned into leaves, or vanished out of gentlemen's pockets, or carried a curse."

"None of that manner of thing," Jack reassured him. "But the true treasure can only be seen -- according to good old Don Guimaraes -- under the light of the moon."

"What's that mean, then? What does it look like the rest of the time?"

"Now, how should I know, eh? But that's what it says, over and over: that the enchanted gold can't be told for what it is, save by moonlight."

"So we'll be there on the night of the full moon," said Jack Shaftoe, staring up at Jack with eyes that were the exact colour of the sky outside the porthole.

"Aye," said Jack. "One more week, Jack, one week to the Isla de Muerta and all its little secrets; one week, and we'll make ourselves immortals, you and I, and listen to our own legends as they grow with each telling, and --"

"One week, Jack, I'll agree to that," said Jack Shaftoe. "But if I don't like it, or it turns out never to've been there at all, then let me seek that other treasure, and bring it back to you. For it ain't worth a fig to me by myself."

* * *

Jack Sparrow, looking very captainly in tricorne and coat, refreshed eyeblack -- though Jack had found the whorish smearing highly attractive -- and an especially satisfied (as opposed to _self_ -satisfied) smirk, had waited until the isle of Trinidad, with its expensive and overrated brothels and its criminal innkeepers, had sunk beneath the horizon, sternwards, before gathering his red-eyed, yellow-faced crew on deck.

"We're off to seek our fortunes," he began, "and the fortune we're after, I swear, has no match anywhere on this earth."

"It's in heaven, then?" cried out some wag, and Sparrow bared his teeth in the man's direction.

"No, mate, it ain't, and nor shall you be," said Jack Sparrow. He let them murmur for a moment -- Jack had seen actors with less aptitude for handling a crowd -- before he said, "for this treasure's twofold! Not only is it made of gold, Aztec gold, gold that was paid to Cortez the Killer -- though he's paid his debt lo these many years -- but also, also!" They looked up at him expectantly, and Jack Shaftoe stifled a laugh: Sparrow brought to mind, more than anything, the fairground charlatans of Jack's youth.

"It brings the gift of life eternal," said Sparrow at last, and there was something compelling in his voice.

The _Black Pearl_ 's crew were, necessarily, pirates, and not given to introspection or consideration -- or anything, really, that was not immediately relevant to the business of staying alive and enjoying that state as much as possible at any given moment. But now they looked around at one another, and then back at their (notoriously mad) captain; and for a while no one spoke.

Bill Turner was scanning the crew slowly, no doubt looking for dissidence and trouble-makers. He turned a ferocious scowl upon Jack, who felt it undeserved and almost said so: but Joe Turk was waving his hand, trying to catch Jack Sparrow's eye.

"What is it, Mr Turk?"

"If it's life eternal," said Joe carefully, "then how come Cortez ain't around no more?"

"Murdered by savages before he got back to it, Mr Turk," said Sparrow. "Anyone else?"

"How come you know all about it, then?" demanded Stone.

"Read it in that old Spanish Don's papers, Mr Stone, didn't I?" Sparrow took the compass from his belt and held it up, face forward, for all to see. "And I've got his little compass, from where we dug it up t'other week. And this compass, Mr Stone, will lead us to that Isle."

"And what if there ain't nothing left?" called Tom Cox, and Jack nodded, for this had been his own question.

Sparrow looked askance at Jack, not admonishing but simply acknowledging. "Then we'll seek out another treasure, Mr Cox: but that's no reason not to try for this one, now, is it?"

Tom grinned and shook his head. He glanced at Jack Shaftoe, too, questioningly: Jack hadn't had a chance to talk to his old mate since Macuro, and certain aspects of his situation had changed since then. For one thing, Jack was not standing with the crew: not with the captain either, but to one side, as if to distinguish himself from the rest of 'em. And there'd been that business in Trinidad, going and coming and then locked in the captain's cabin for the balance of their stay; probably (Jack felt himself blush) without overmuch circumspection. Oh yes, Tom'd have questions, and there was (according to Jack Sparrow) a four-day sail ahead of the _Black Pearl_ before she docked at this mysterious island.

"An' this ... treasure," said Ragetti, "is it goin' to keep us in our prime, an' make old men young?"

"I don't _know_ any old men, mate," drawled Jack Sparrow, fiddling with a beard-braid. "Or perhaps, Mr Ragetti, you meant yourself?"

Jack Shaftoe wanted to laugh. Sparrow'd had the right of it, after all, when he'd told Walter that Ragetti (caught eavesdropping, the idiot) was harmless.

"Tell you what, mate," he said mockingly, "you're on the wrong ship. No, no, wait: if you're looking for the Fountain of Youth, you wanted to go up that river with the _Gloriana_. Walter and his merry men, mate, remember them? In the tavern?"

There was a swell of laughter, for the _Gloriana_ 's voyage had been the subject of much rumour and speculation, though Jack hadn't had a chance to fuel it with his own observations. Ragetti was muttering something, looking at Jack with hatred, and that was almost as unfair as Bill's ferocity: but Jack could not bring himself to care overmuch, for Jack Sparrow was looking at him with a third easily-read emotion, in front of all his crew, and Jack basked in that regard.

 

 

Later, he sat with Jack Sparrow and Bootstrap Bill, passing around a bottle of honeyed rum that someone'd brought on board at Port o' Spain.

"There's a gulf of difference, y'know," said Bill, "'tween _living_ forever, and staying _young_ forever."

"Like that bloke in the play," said Jack knowledgeably, trying not to smirk like a scholar when Jack Sparrow nodded at him. "Immortal, but all shrivelled up and past it, so he couldn't screw his lady-love."

"Well," said Sparrow, "here's to none of us shrivelling up." He raised his cup to Bill, but Jack caught the gleam of his sidelong grin in the moonlight. The moon was a few days from full yet. It hung near the horizon, red and swollen, casting a coppery light over the three of them.

"What about Ragetti?" said Jack, looking away from the ominous moon: not because he was intimidated by omens, but because there were far finer sights to be seen.

"What about him, mate?" said Sparrow, grinning wider and more openly.

"Troublemaker, ain't 'e?" said Bill. "Though his mate -- Pintel, I mean -- were worse."

They shared a brief moment of silence. Very brief.

"Don't forget he was one of the mutineers," said Bill.

"I hadn't forgotten, Mr Turner," said Sparrow evenly, pouring himself more rum. "After the Isle, he can go where he will -- maybe upriver, eh, Jack?" That sidelong, merry grin again, and Jack could feel his resistance dissolving in rum and rusty moonlight.

Bill had noticed that look too, or perhaps one of the several speaking looks that had preceded it: he necked his rum, declined Sparrow's offer of more, and took himself off (so he said) to his bunk.

The strange light cast Jack Sparrow's face, still shadowed by his tricorne, into relief, eyes dark as empty sockets and high cheekbones gleaming ivory-pale. "So, Mr Shaftoe," he murmured, leaning closer, "you're concerned that we'll spend eternity too ... too _shrivelled_ to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh?"

Jack shrugged. "Me?" he said. "I can take them or leave them. Imagine what a man might achieve, if he weren't distracted by the generation and interaction of his various humours."

But Sparrow's smile, gold again in the paling light of the ascendant moon, said that he was imagining something quite different, and more base, and more immediately practicable. And after all, reasoned Jack Shaftoe, it'd be a pity to leave those humours to congeal, when Sparrow's very presence threatened to draw them from him; as he was being drawn toward Jack Sparrow with each breath he took.


	8. Mortal Hazards, Chapter Eight

  
  
The _Black Pearl_ had run before a shrieking hellish storm for the last day of her voyage towards this lost, uncharted island. Jack Sparrow had stood at the helm, rain-lashed and soaked to the skin, as vitalised as though the lightning that'd sizzled all around them were running in his veins. Or perhaps this unlooked-for exuberance -- he'd been awake the clock round -- was engendered by the presence of Jack Shaftoe at his side, grinning as broad and joyous as Jack himself, steadying the helm with one strong, scarred hand as Jack turned to cry another change of course to Bootstrap Bill.

Bill, wrapped in a villainous pea-coat that bore mute testament (in rips and stains) to its previous owner's fate, called out orders to the men aloft, and there was the rush and slap of wet canvas being reefed. The _Pearl_ was rocketing along, flexing and groaning and bucking like a live thing beneath Jack's feet, and ahead of them the sea stretched out forever, all creamy foam and black troughs made into a vision of Hell by the last light of a blood-red sun, falling rapidly toward the horizon (toward Mexico, and the Bay of Campeachy, and the jungle-cities of the isthmus) from a heavy straight-set line of ebony storm clouds.

"Weather's clearing," shouted Jack Shaftoe, grinning. His hand was next to Jack's on the dark wood of the wheel, not quite touching but close enough that from anyone else it'd've been an unwelcome approach. From Jack Shaftoe -- who had laboured as hard as any of the crew while the storm threw them before it, and who'd come straight to the helm to keep Jack company -- it was as good as a warm embrace: and Jack longed for that embrace, once the last gusts of storm-winds had blown themselves out and the _Black Pearl_ had dropped anchor in the little cove to the north of the Isla de Muerta's ragged, jagged, snaggle-toothed reefs.

Jack glanced down at the compass again. They were running straight, almost due north: and now, glancing ahead, he could see a sharp crest of rock rearing, silhouetted, from the livid ocean. The compass needle span right round, full circle, and settled once more, pointing towards the eastern end of the island.

"Aye, Jack," said Jack Sparrow. "We'll be there by moonrise."

"We're coming in fast," said Shaftoe levelly, looking straight at Jack.

"Aye, Mr Shaftoe," said Jack, glancing down again at the compass. "But this little toy shall take us safely to our harbour."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Old Don Guimaraes' map," said Jack, "showed the east coast clear and clean, and the west all snarled with reefs and rocks. And see, we're being steered up the eastern side of the island." Already it was looming, high and black and without form, between the ship and the setting sun. "Now, this place is never shown on any of the charts or maps or Atlases I've seen." The needle swung again, and Jack heaved on the wheel, bringing the _Black Pearl_ to port. Her head was now toward the land, though the wind was less ferocious here, in the lee of the isle, and she was not being driven as rapidly as before.

"And what if it's wrong, at the last?" said Jack Shaftoe more quietly. "What if --"

A spire of rock, streaked with guano, rose from the sea not ten yards on their starboard bow, and Jack flinched inside at the thought of that spire crashing through the sturdy hull of his lovely ship as though she were made of paper.

"If the compass lies, Jack Shaftoe," he said, "then we're bound for the depths."

Shaftoe looked directly at him, just at him, brave and reckless and grinning; and it was such a look that Jack wanted to give the helm over to dear dependable Bill, and drag Jack Shaftoe below to his cabin, and redeem every promise implicit in Shaftoe's gaze. But, too, he knew it for a signal to the crew, whose anxious looks were increasingly frequent and anguished: sailing with a mad captain, sailing toward this wall of rock, sailing...

The compass whirled again, and Jack hauled on the wheel again, and felt the glorious underlying warmth of Shaftoe's wet skin against his own: and then, there in the tall black cliff, there was a rip of scarlet light, and a strait that would've caught the _Black Pearl_ fast like a cork in a bottle, if she'd had her studdingsail booms spread. A rip of red light reflecting from a secret harbour: the still heart of the Isla de Muerta.

"To the oars!" yelled Jack, throat raw from twenty hours of orders and salt air. He leaned against the wheel, willing his precious _Pearl_ to respond to him, willing her to point her gilded prow dead-centre along the line of this steep-sided chasm, and so come through into the open water beyond.

Below, the thunderous rumbling as the oars came out, and then splashing (and some piratical language) as the blades met the water. This passage was almost too narrow for rowing: there was a horrible scraping noise that made Jack flinch again, but 'twas only Joe Stone's oar against the tall black wall of the inlet.

" _Now_ I believe it," said Jack Shaftoe, beside him, very softly: and Jack loved him for not speaking his doubts before, to the ears of an increasingly jittery crew.

And the rest of them were exclaiming now too: for there in the calm eye of the Isle was a veritable graveyard of ships, all shrouded in their own stays and sails like flies in a gargantuan spider's web, still and bleached and silent except for the creaking of their tattered timbers.

"Here before us for the treasure, I'll warrant," said Jack Shaftoe: and Jack simply nodded -- for it was clear that none of them had _left_ with anything -- and held up the compass to better see its last flickers of direction, and grinned at Jack Shaftoe just for being here, beside him, as it all began to happen.

* * *

By the time the _Black Pearl_ had negotiated that maze of dead ships -- some manned by bare-boned skeletons, which made Jack Shaftoe shudder -- the crimson glow had faded and it was night, very dark around them like the high black walls of this hidden harbour. Yet tonight was the night of the full moon, Jack knew, and the night of the treasure -- this Aztec gold with all its burden of fable and fiction.

And yet Jack Sparrow, who was not a stupid man, believed in it: believed those old stories, and the map: and, well, the compass, which Jack'd seen with his own incredulous eyes as it danced and span and whirled, and showed true the way through those black rocks to the harbour.

Sparrow was standing with Bill, now, discussing who'd stay on board when the rest of the crew went ashore. The air was warmer here, in the sheltered cove, and Bill had taken off his heavy coat: Jack was glad that it was dark, for even in the flickering lantern-light Bill's shirt looked fit for burning.

"No point in leaving much of a watch," Sparrow was saying as Jack drew closer. "No one else can find this island, not without dear old Don Guimaraes' little compass."

"Ah, Captain," said Jack Shaftoe, scanning the dark cliffs and trying to look as though he used Jack Sparrow's title every day, "but what if there's someone here already?"

Sparrow looked at him thoughtfully, and then at the tangle of abandoned ships that filled one half of the cove.

"Aye," he said at last. "We'll have a watch, Bill. Full shares plus a little extra for any man as cares to stay aboard and watch for ... for trouble."

Jack wondered what Sparrow'd been about to say, before he faltered: and when he glanced over at Bootstrap, he saw that Bill had noticed too.

"I'm coming with you," he said, and Jack Sparrow's pleased expression was all the better for Bill's leery, suspicious look: who d'you think you are, that look said clear as day, insisting on anything round here?

But the look on Sparrow's face must surely answer Bill.

They went ashore in three boats, three crowded boats, with the watch calling good-luck wishes after them. Joe Turk'd stayed behind, and old Rob; and Tom Cox, who reckoned he'd earn his share of their spoils more readily this way, being new to the company. (Jack'd looked him in the eye and grinned, and Tom, grinning too, had made a rude gesture at Jack and let his eyes slide to Captain Jack Sparrow, all done up in tricorn and coat, glittering like a heathen idol: Jack thought that perhaps Tom didn't have any great problem with the way that things'd turned out, after all.)

There was a creek leading up into a dark, Stygian cave, and Jack Sparrow – the codex, a bundle of tatty papers, gripped tightly in his hand; Jack hoped it was waterproof, given the splashing of the oars -- directed the boats into the darkness. Sparrow, of course, was in the prow of the first boat, naked torch held high. Jack, just behind him, knew that this flame, guttering or changing colour, would warn them of bad air or unseen movement. He peered over his captain's shoulder, trying to make out shapes in the darkness, but -- aside from the occasional loom of a rock, or (once, disconcertingly) a sword-pierced skeleton -- there was nothing to see.

And then the keel scraped against rock, and Sparrow lifted his torch high, and sprang out (Jack shouldering someone aside to be right behind Jack Sparrow) onto a shingly little beach.

The shingle did not sound right under Jack Shaftoe's boots: he bent, and swept up a handful of pebbles, and saw as he raised his hand again that they were not all made of stone.

"Gold!" he cried: and then stepped smartly out of the way before he could be knocked over, quick as skittles, by the greedy mass of pirates.

"You'll wish you hadn't mentioned that, mate," said Jack Sparrow softly to him: but he was grinning.

"Plenty for us all," said Jack, opening his palm again to show Sparrow the big, thin coins he'd scooped up: Spanish reales, he thought, though he'd never seen a whole one before, but only eighths and halves and quarters. The torchlight glittered and gleamed on them, and refracted up into Sparrow's face, making him more exotically beautiful than ever. For a moment Jack did not care about treasure, or stories, or anything but Jack Sparrow: for a moment there was nothing else in the world but the way that Sparrow was looking at him, _shining_ , gilded by torchlight and gold-light and all hungry for Jack himself; neither of them paying the least attention to the squabbling horde behind them.

Jack held out his hand mutely, for Sparrow to take his share, for it seemed wrong for the ship's captain to forego this first taste of the gold. Sparrow looked down at it, and then up at Shaftoe: and murmured, "Depends what you're paying me for, mate."

Jack might've been insulted, except that Sparrow's sultry expression was so exactly identical to that he'd worn in the tavern, in _oh god that dress_ , in Stabroek when first --

"You'll be worth," and here Jack had to swallow, quite overcome by some unrecognised sensation, and fight down the urge to embrace Jack Sparrow, "every penny, all of it, all the gold in the world: and this, Jack, it's just for one kiss, just one --"

He saw that impulse mirrored in Jack Sparrow's eyes, and began to lean toward him: but Bill was shouting at the men, something about getting off their arses and not scrabbling around like a clutch of hens, and Sparrow drew back: but his mouth shaped the word "Later," and Jack longed for later to come.

* * *

Bootstrap had herded the men -- pockets lumpy with spilled Spanish gold -- up the spangled beach and into the middle of the cavern, where there was an open expanse of bare rock. Little inlets of inky ocean twined among the rocks, reflecting back the light from their torches as if aflame: but there, right in the centre of the cavern, was a single stone chest, and above it a seeming haze of greyish light, already almost eclipsed by the golden torchlight.

Outside, Jack Sparrow knew, the full moon would have risen. The cliffs that surrounded the _Black Pearl_ had been too steep and tall for them to glimpse any horizon, or even the underlit rags of the last storm-clouds, but the moon should have been coming up as they rowed through this final twisty maze of inlets and creeks and black cavern walls, towards this final treasure.

And there -- here -- it was.

Jack climbed the little slope, and the men stood back and let him go first: whether because he was their captain, or because Bootstrap'd ordered them so, or because they were, even now, a little afraid of this cursed gold in its ancient tomb. The men stood back, but Jack Shaftoe was at his side, without comment or question, as though it was his place: which, Jack had to admit, was very likely true.

The chest stood on its own plinth, carven all about with heathen 'gravings and reliefs. Jack recognised some of them from the Codex: but others were new, and for the first time he wondered whether Don Guimaraes had possessed and passed on the whole of the Codex, or merely fragments of it.

This was not the time to show doubt.

"Would you hold that, Jack?" he said, thrusting out the torch towards Shaftoe: and Shaftoe took it, face impassive as though he'd guessed Jack's thoughts, and as quickly recognised the wisdom of keeping them between themselves. He stood and held the light high as Jack prowled around the coffer, peering intently at each new image, trying to puzzle them out.

"Aye," he said at last, raising his voice so that the men -- muttering amongst themselves, already comparing and exchanging the gold from the beach -- could hear him clearly. "'Tis Cortez' treasure, here within this chest."

"What do the carvings mean?" called Bootstrap.

"'Tis the tale of the gold, set there for all to see," said Jack. He went to the side of the chest away from the crew, and Shaftoe came with him, ready -- Jack did not doubt -- to keep him honest if he misdescribed these pictures.

"Here, on this side, there's Cortez with his army; and then, here, the bringing of the treasure; and last, the Aztecs and the Spanish all happy, drinking and feasting together like friends."

Jack Shaftoe leaned over -- so close to Jack that his skin tingled -- and frowned at the chest for a moment. "Aye," he said, "and crowds of pretty girls, dressed," he winked, "as the Indians do today."

There was a chorus of appreciative whoops from the audience.

"Then, this side," said Jack, "tells of the gold. Here, there's skulls, all bare bones and staring empty sockets and the gold heaped about them: for they're dead."

A frisson of horror through the men: and Jack Shaftoe, _oh Christ_ on his knees, examining that picture ever so closely; but at last he unfolded himself and stood up, nodding his assent.

"And here," said Jack, pointing to the middle panel, feeling like a school-teacher or an actor, "here's Cortez and his men, see their Spanish helmets like pine-cones? They're taking the gold, taking it from this very chest." It might've been any chest, to be truthful, since it lacked any distinguishing detail, much less a copy in small of these same ornaments: but Jack Shaftoe was nodding again, and the men seemed to trust him.

"And last," said Jack Sparrow, taking off his hat and clutching it to his chest like some eulogising priest, "last, those same conquistadores, happy and live and laughing!"

"I don't think they're laughing, Jack," whispered Jack Shaftoe to him, face turned from the rest of the men. He was frowning, Jack saw: and, more, saw it by increasingly argent light, for from somewhere far above them came the light of the full moon, adding a whole new silvery dimension to the fiery wavering torchlight.

"Alive, not dead!" cried Jack Sparrow. "Wealthy with gold, and blessed with everlasting life! Jack Shaftoe, help me." And he went to the chest, setting his hands on the stone lid.

Shaftoe was still frowning, and staring at that last carving; but he did not argue aloud. He wedged the torch into a fissure in the rock, and went to the other end of the chest.

"Now," he said: and as they began to lift the heavy block of stone, the moonlight vanished.

Jack faltered, and there was a nervous rumble from the crew: but Jack Shaftoe said, loud and cheerful, "'Tis only a cloud across the moon! Call yourselves pirates, eh, to jump and tremble --"

"Aye, Mr Shaftoe," said Jack in his most menacing voice, leering at Shaftoe across the breadth of the carved stone between them. And, much softer, for Jack Shaftoe's ears alone, "I'll make _you_ tremble, Jack."

He saw Jack Shaftoe's answering grin in the guileful torchlight, and the way that Shaftoe's tongue crept out, sly and subversive, to swipe across his lips: and then Jack Shaftoe was crying, "Then let's do it!"

And the two of them raised the lid, and heaved it aside.

* * *

There was something that Jack Sparrow, with all his cleverness and his learning and his compass and his damned Codex, was missing: and Jack hadn't quite figured it out yet, but he knew that it was something vital. Something that was not, not quite, not at all, as Sparrow had described it.

And yet for the life of him he couldn't see what it was. The carvings on the Aztec chest were just as Sparrow had described them to the men: the gold heaped within was bright and gleaming and, well, _golden_ in the blaze of the torches: and there'd been moonlight to see by, to seek by, to show them this treasure where it lay. Cortez' treasure, that showed itself true only by moonlight. A shame that the moon had gone in; the torchlight, alone, was too like flame, and led Jack unpleasantly to recollections of dreams that, after every Puritan preacher's visit, had haunted his childhood. Hell, and lakes of burning fire, and everlasting torment.

Jack held in mind, as though it were a talisman, the memory of Jack Sparrow's secret smile to him. _Life_ everlasting: that was it. And he could think of many worse persons -- though none better -- to share eternity with.

And now Jack Sparrow was reaching down into the chest -- o the line of his arm, his throat, his back -- and scooping up one single heathen-faced coin; and straightening, eyes on Jack Shaftoe, saying, "I don't feel..."

But the sentence faded away into the hushed stillness that was the _Black Pearl_ 's crew, waiting on their captain's word. And, worse than anything, Jack could see something -- life, or vitality, or Jack Sparrow's own unique selfness -- drain from Sparrow's mien, leaving him no more himself than a painted puppet.

Jack Sparrow was staring directly at him, but his eyes were as empty as a skull's, except for a faint residue of shock. "I don't _feel_ ," he whispered harshly; and Jack felt a faint, clear shock somewhere deep within his breast, the shock of something breaking.

And then the moon reached back down, all silver, into the cavern, and the screaming began.

Jack Shaftoe stepped back, aghast, still looking into Jack Sparrow's eyes which now _were_ empty black sockets, set in ancient bleached bone, and yet still glimmering without emotion. For a moment Sparrow did not realise what had happened: Jack could see him beginning to know it, glancing down at the bare bones that had been his hand, and then bringing that hand up wonderingly (except uncaringly) before his empty eyes, to see the ring rattling on his finger.

Jack had stepped back, and now he stepped forward once more. The men were panicking, some of them already splashing back into the water to escape their transform'd captain: some of them, half-calmed by Bill Turner's ineffectual commands, merely making an outcry fit -- Jack smiled grimly -- to wake the dead.

"Right to left," he said insistently to Jack Sparrow: but Sparrow was still staring at him, somehow emptied out, and if Jack's heart had not already broken it would have shattered at that look, that so un-Sparrow look.

And suddenly Jack Shaftoe saw that there was only one thing to be done, if he were to live with himself for even a few minutes more.

"Not without me!" he cried, and reached into the chest for one cold coin: and felt everything that mattered, everything he'd _felt_ , slough away like a snake's discarded skin.


	9. Mortal Hazards, Chapter Nine

  
_with very many thanks to[](http://tessabeth.livejournal.com/profile)[ **tessabeth**](http://tessabeth.livejournal.com/) for running an eye over this when I wibbled!_  
  
Captain Jack Sparrow had always prided himself on his quick-wittedness, his cunning, his ability to rise to any occasion: but somehow, now, there was no urgency to any of it. No hurry. All he felt, staring at Jack Shaftoe -- or rather at the moving, _speaking_ , ivory bones that'd priorly underpinned Jack Shaftoe's mortal form -- was a vast, slow anger at himself, for having had, and lost, something so unique and rare.

And it wasn't that he felt nothing. That was not it at all. But each time before -- apart from those very first few encounters, back before he'd seen Jack Shaftoe for what he was, strong and quick and witty and beautiful, Jack's own match -- he'd looked at Shaftoe and wanted him, skin to skin, flesh pressed to (into) flesh, mouths ...

He remembered all that as though it were dry crumbling paper.

Jack wondered what would happen if he wept. Where would the tears come from? Where would they go?

"Captain!" called Bill Turner, approaching. The moonlight, or something, had painted his face a ghastly ghostly white, but still: approaching. The rest of the crew, Jack saw, were huddled together on the gold-strewn beach, murmuring and (how humiliating) _praying_ amongst themselves. But Bill, dear dependable stolid Bill, was coming towards him, reaching out a hand.

"Come out of the moonlight, Jack. And you, Mr Shaftoe."

A sensible idea, thought Jack, and so he followed Bill Turner to a place where the cavern wall angled and the moonlight could not reach. Jack heard Jack Shaftoe's steady steps behind him on the rock. The flesh crept back onto his bones like an itch: but a faraway itch, the ghost of an itch, an itch that belonged to somebody else.

"Jack..." said Bill helplessly, staring at him. His face was still pale, even without the moonlight, but the wavering torch he bore lent colour to his skin, and to Jack's, and to Shaftoe's. "Jack, what happened?"

"The gold's cursed," said Jack Sparrow.

"Was that not in your book? In that Spanish Don's book?" cried Bill.

"D'you take me for a fool, Mr Turner?" said Jack. "Of course it wasn't in the book, or I'd never have taken the gold, now would I?"

Bill looked relieved at this vestigial evidence of temper. "Of course not, Captain."

"'Twas on the casket," said Jack Shaftoe, who had -- Jack realised -- stood at his side these few minutes past, quite unnoticed; something that would've been unthinkable an hour ago, the two of them still sensitised like compass-needles to one another's proximity. Now Shaftoe stood there, close enough to touch, and Jack felt nothing, or as near as made no difference.

"On the casket? What d'you mean, Mr Shaftoe?" said Bill, puzzled.

"Being as how I'm unlettered, and cannot read," said Shaftoe, "I've fewer expectations of what I see, or how I'm supposed to see it."

Jack recalled Shaftoe's coruscating mockery, and the delicious light in his eyes when he'd unleashed it. There was no light now in his dulled eyes, and Jack was beginning not to miss it. This should probably alarm him more than it did.

"The pictures on that chest," said Shaftoe, "read right to left. First happiness, then the gold, then ... this." He did not bother gesturing at himself, or at Jack.

"Then why'd you take it, mate?" Bill asked. "Jack didn't know his fate: but you saw what happened to him, and you took it anyway. What were you thinking?"

Shaftoe shrugged, and Jack thought that Bill was probably right: what a fool, to damn himself to this living death. Maybe it'd been that Imp of the Perverse that Jack Shaftoe so often blamed for his more outrageous decisions -- though Jack Sparrow had, in the past, had reason to thank it. Was this just one more masthead leap?

On the beach where they'd landed, two of the men -- one of them Ragetti, Jack thought -- were squabbling loudly about something or other. Gold, no doubt. That was a good piratical argument, and Jack'd had it many times.

Bill craned his neck to see what was going on. "They're not happy, Jack," he said urgently. "They don't want to be captained by a, begging your pardon, a skellington: and you promised them gold."

"They can pick gold from the beach," said Jack Shaftoe. "That ain't cursed, or I'd've been bare bones when I took that first handful."

Bootstrap looked relieved. "I'll tell 'em that," he said, and went off to gather the men into some sort of order.

Jack looked at Shaftoe. Here in the torchlight, he looked alive -- yet not quite alive, not with the vivid infusion of life that'd been Jack Shaftoe since Jack had first met him. This was an empty Shaftoe-shell, with nothing familiar about its expression, nothing in its faded blue eyes as it stared back at him. Presumably it -- he -- was thinking the same about Jack.

"There must be a way to break the curse," said Jack Shaftoe.

Jack tilted his head on one side and regarded the pretty husk of the man he'd known. He didn't want, any more, to see tanned skin and firm muscle, and that dense blue drowning gaze, as shown to him by the lying torch-flame: he wanted the bare bone he had seen before in the moonlight, for that had stirred less loss in the empty place that'd been his heart.

"Aye," he said. "There must."

"D'you not know it, Jack? Ain't it in that Codex of yours?" Jack Shaftoe gestured at the bundle of papers stuffed into Jack's coat pocket.

"Later, maybe," said Jack. "The light's not good, and --"

"Now," said Jack Shaftoe, "while I remember why I took the coin."

Jack stared at him. "Well?" he said at last.

"Well what?"

"Why _did_ you take it?" said Jack, with a creeping flesh-over-bones sense that he should know the answer already.

Jack Shaftoe's eyes were empty, and yet now Jack -- imagining that he could feel the place where his heart had been -- imagined, too, that there was a glimmer of ... of something there: and he remembered those chilly eyes as blue as a summer afternoon mid-ocean, falling, drowning in that azure gaze, and --

"Because," said Jack Shaftoe, stepping back into the cold moonlight and seeming to shiver as the flesh went from his bones, "because, mortal life or _this_ , Jack, either way it's nothing without you."

And, half-remembering how it had been, Jack knew that he must break the curse: for the world was a poorer place, this moment, for lacking Jack Shaftoe's vivid presence.

* * *

Odd, to look at Sparrow and feel nothing: and yet it wasn't nothing, though it was not what he had felt before. No lust, no longing, no particular _interest_ ("O criminal," whispered a forlorn small voice from somewhere, "to have no interest in Jack Sparrow!") but there _was_ something, the ghost of something, the glimmer or shadow or flicker of something that, even now when he was dust-dry and rattling like the bone-man's cart, kept Jack Shaftoe at Sparrow's side. Jack Sparrow -- somehow shrunken, as though the life'd been sucked out of him like juice from an orange -- sat there propped against the stone, peering at that damned Codex, making Jack wish, not for the first time, that he could be bothered to learn to read.

Though now he had eternity ahead of him, that'd be as fine a waste of time as any other.

This was (Jack told himself) ridiculous. He'd expected to find a cartload of gold, and another load of foolish tales -- much the same, really, as he'd have expected if Jack Sparrow had let him go after that Fountain of Youth that Walter and his mysterious Doctor friend had been so set on. Jack had not anticipated living death, or immortality, or whatever anyone cared to call this state: and he did not like it at all.

Bill was moving among the crew, trying to cheer them, and Jack saw more than a few encouraging smiles directed at their captain. After all, these were the men who (Ragetti excepted) hadn't mutinied, the men who'd never stopped respecting Jack Sparrow for his wit and cunning and that mad, unpredictable edge. These were the men, Jack thought, who -- if Sparrow, after all, could find no cure for the curse -- would boast of sailing on the _Black Pearl_ with her undead captain, rather than fleeing Mad Jack Sparrow the first time they saw him moonlit.

"'Tis easy, Jack," said Sparrow beside him, rustling paper, and there was something in his voice that Jack (who'd watched Jack Sparrow poring over these creased papers, night after night) had not expected so soon.

"It is?" he said. "Then tell me what's to be done, and we'll do it. And then..."

"Then?" prompted Sparrow, after a moment.

Jack shrugged, forgetting what he'd been about to say. "What's your answer, then? How do we lift this curse?"

"We return the gold," said Jack Sparrow. "That's all. That gold we took with our own hands, and just a little blood."

"Blood? Whose blood?"

"Yours, Jack, and mine. 'Begun by blood, by blood undone': that's what it says here, and whose blood else would matter?"

"You didn't mention this before," said Jack Shaftoe.

"I didn't _know_ it before," said Sparrow.

"But you found the bit about the curse quick enough."

"But he doesn't call it a curse, savvy?"

Bill had come back over to them, and was turning his head from Sparrow to Shaftoe in mute puzzlement. "What's amiss?" he said.

"Nothing," said Jack. "Why should there be?"

"You're arguing," said Bill. "Except you're not. Might as well be passin' the time of day at one of the Governor's tea-parties in Nassau." He was grinning at Jack Sparrow, trying to catch his eye and share the joke, but Sparrow just looked back at him; and the look on Bill's face made Jack Shaftoe look away, over at the beach, where the men were picking up coins as big as oyster-shells.

"We've a plan, then, Jack?" he said to Sparrow, getting to his feet (knees creaking like an old man's) and stepping out into the blue moonlight. There was a susurrus from those of the crew who happened to be looking this way: but less alarm than there had been before. Jack, waiting for Sparrow to join him, raised his arm and examined the line of the bone. There was the place he'd broken it when he was a boy, falling from a window-ledge on a wet night. There, a scorched V -- who'd have thought it went all the way down to the bone? -- where he'd been branded.

He turned to look at Jack Sparrow, whose own pirate-brand would surely show clear. Sparrow was still fleshed by the ruddy torchlight, and his black, black gaze was fixed upon Jack and his brittle white bones.

"Let's break this curse, Jack," he said; and, though it was not quite life-like, there was something about the way Jack Sparrow's mouth shaped his, their, name; something that Jack _wanted_ , in a way he had not thought to feel any more.

Because the graven Aztec chest -- just, Jack thought, like one of those Egyptian sarcophagi that rich men had in their gardens -- was stuck there where the light of the full moon could fall straight down upon it, they could not end the curse where it'd begun. Even Bill chuckled (though it was not a comfortable laugh) at the sight of the two of them comprehending that, bare-boned and monstrous by moonlight, there was nothing there to _cut_ , no way of letting their own blood -- or one another's, for Jack had put his knife to the elegant bones of Sparrow's wrist, in some muddled notion of blood-brotherhood.

"Must we wait 'til dawn?" he said.

Sparrow shook his head (tatterdemalion baubles clattering against his skull) and said, "No, Jack: only come out of the light."

There in the torchlight, with Turner and Stone and Davies and the rest of 'em gathered around -- for they wanted to see the magic reversed, and their captain restored to them -- Jack took hold of Sparrow's hand. So dry and cold and unyielding, unresisting, unSparrow: it was like handling a dead body, a stranger's corpse fished from the river or the gutter. He looked into Jack Sparrow's eyes, searching for something of what he knew had been between them, and could see nothing in the blackness, save the reflected glint of gold: though there was no gold in his hand, or in Jack's.

Sparrow's fingers tightened painfully on Jack's wrist, and he said, "Do it."

Jack did. He slit the tanned, scarred skin over the thick vein in Jack Sparrow's wrist, and then let the blood fall onto the bright golden disc that Sparrow now produced from somewhere inside his voluminous coat. "Now me," he said.

Sparrow seized his wrist and held it firm, and Jack's skin tingled as though he were already returning to life: but Sparrow merely made a small incision, delicate as a barber-surgeon's phlebotomy, across the silvery V on the brawn of Jack Shaftoe's thumb.

"Your coin, Jack; bring it out," he said, and the black glitter of his eyes seemed very bright.

The torch guttered, and there was a collective inhalation as the men saw mortality flickering over the two of them, each decline of flame permitting more moonlight.

No need for words now; the two of them, together, heading for the still-open chest with their life-blood still dripping from suddenly-bare fingerbones, and from the glittery gold coins, magnets for every particle of light in the vast cavern, rattling 'gainst those same bones: and, "Now!" said Jack Sparrow, taking Jack's unbloody hand, and casting his own blood-smeared coin back into the chest as Jack threw his.

They stared at one another for a moment, waiting for it to happen. Waiting.

And then, above a growing growling wave of surprise, came Bootstrap's voice: "Where's Ragetti?"

* * *

"I swear I'll kill 'im," Bill said furiously.

"Ah," said Jack Sparrow, "but I doubt he can be killed, any more."

Bill looked at him, bemused.

"We're immortal, mate," said Jack: and stood there, grinning -- grimacing -- at Bill, as (without flourish) he produced his own dagger and pushed the blade into the place where his heart had lived.

Interesting, the way that Shaftoe reached out so swiftly to prevent him, and then let his hand drop away as he recognised the futility of it. Interesting.

"I know what Ragetti's up to," said Bill suddenly, swallowing and looking away from Jack's macabre dramaticks. "Little sod."

"What's that?" said Jack Shaftoe.

"Ragetti. You know what he's like, Jack: gets an idea into his head --"

"-- or has it put there, aye," said Jack, drawing out the dagger. Though it did not hurt, still he felt it: and that helped him to think about what happened each time that he looked at Jack Shaftoe.

"Then he's fixed on it, ain't he?" Bill went on, oblivious to Jack's secret thoughts. "Like a barnacle on your keel."

"Aye, an' what's your point?" said Jack Shaftoe; and Bill said readily, "He's after bringing back his mate."

"That won't work," said Jack.

"Ah," said Shaftoe, "but he thinks it will, see, because he looked at that chest and saw -- as you did yourself, Jack, and so might any man -- the dead, and the gold, and the living: and the stupid fellow read it like something out of the Bible, where the dead come back to life."

"Aye," said Bill, "and he reckons he found the grave, remember, Jack?"

Jack Sparrow took a moment to compose himself, not least because he was unaccustomed to being outthought by anyone. He looked at Jack Shaftoe without emotion (since this was, now, not only _something_ , but _all_ , that he could do) and wondered if he would mind Shaftoe's cleverness, when -- if -- they were themselves once more.

"Find out if anyone saw him go, would you, mate?" he said to Bill: and Bill, now apparently quite accustomed to taking orders from a living skeleton dressed in his captain's clothes, went back to where the men were sprawled on the picked-clean beach, playing heads-or-tails with (and for) small fortunes.

"He was up near the chest, and Davies had some words with 'im about it," Bill reported at last. "Then there was a bit of a fuss about ... no, doesn't matter, nothing: and that's about the last anyone saw of young Ragetti."

"Could he have taken a couple of coins and headed off somewhere?" said Jack.

"Aye," said Bootstrap Bill, "but wherever he's gone, he ain't in a boat." He gestured at the three gigs drawn up on the specie'd shingle.

"Wouldn't need a boat, would he, Jack?" said Jack Sparrow, grinning unpleasantly.

Shaftoe shook his head. "But someone would've noticed if he'd walked straight into the water."

"Then where --" said Bill, and Jack pointed past him, at a dark fissure that yawned hungrily behind the moonlit Aztec treasure.

"If that goes anywhere, then he'll have gone there," he said. "And if it doesn't, why, then we'll meet him coming back." Jack Sparrow paused, and looked (all empty-eyed) at Shaftoe, whose clattery hand tightened on the cutlass-hilt at his side. "And my friend here, Mr Jack Shaftoe, is not someone Ragetti'd want to meet in the dark."

"He'll be sorry if I meet him anywhere," said Shaftoe, and his sharp grin showed more teeth than Jack had expected. Bill, flinching, stepped back, and said something about keeping watch, and near-bolted for the safety of the company.

Shaftoe turned to Jack, and though he had no face, yet that snarl became a smile. "Captain Sparrow," he said, bowing like a courtier, "shall we sally to the hunt?"


	10. Mortal Hazards, Chapter Ten

  
_Two more chapters after this one, and it will definitely all be posted by October 31st, as NaNoWriMo calls!_  
  
They did not find Ragetti in the steep, narrow, pitch-black passageway, but the torch in Sparrow's hand, throwing grotesque shadows on the rough rock that surrounded them, showed evidence that someone had come this way before them.

"Might've been years ago," said Jack Shaftoe. He stooped to finger a footprint in the wet sand. (Here, where the moonlight could not reach, the two of them were most nearly themselves). "But this is still damp, Jack."

Now the path steepened and doglegged to the left, and though the way was wider the footing was less even. The light of their torch seemed to dim as, side by side, they climbed. Sparrow stumbled, and Jack caught his arm to steady him. He felt a sudden strange urge to tighten his grip, to leave bruises and marks (all unnoticed) on the tanned, dead skin: but it was a baseless urge, and he let it go.

There was a distant rushing sound from above, a noise that brought to Jack's mind a night's walk through a pine forest at night, long ago, far away. (But everything seemed far away.) He could not smell forest, but then he could scarcely smell his own body, or Sparrow's venerable leather coat.

"'Tis the sea," Sparrow remarked.

"We're nearly out, then," said Jack. "Now, if we had a map..."

"This is the north of the island," said Sparrow, "with the _Black Pearl_ safe and secure in that little round harbour, and vicious rocks down the west coast, and smooth cliffs all up the east: and the Isle's all hilly and rolling, and covered with jungle, and no human soul lives here."

Jack forbore to comment on the likely state of his own soul, or Sparrow's. This unlife was bad enough without bringing religion -- always a chancy subject -- into the matter. "Where d'you think he'll go?" he said instead.

"If he's after Pintel's grave," said Jack Sparrow, "then he's in for a fair old walk."

"And a damp one," said Jack. "What --"

He stopped speaking. The tunnel debouched abruptly onto a perilous narrow strip of lichened rock, all layered grey in the moonlight: and Jack Sparrow, walking out so nonchalant into that light, seemed untransformed at first, until he turned to make sure of Jack's presence. Then Jack saw the hollow skull, the charnel-house scraps of skin clinging to fissured bone, and for a moment he could not see Jack Sparrow at all, but only a ghoulish effigy hung with his effects.

"Jack?" he said, taken aback.

Jack Sparrow, or the elegant framework of him, looked back emptily, and Jack knew without glancing down at himself that Sparrow was seeing just such a spectre, draped in a tatty shirt, grinding the discarded torch into the sand to extinguish it. Then Sparrow grinned -- teeth more silver than gold in the colourless light -- and all at once he was Jack Sparrow again.

"See, Mr Shaftoe," he said. "There's the _Pearl_ , aslumber in the harbour."

Jack went to look. Behind them, the moon was sinking towards the black crest of the Isla de Muerta, and their shadows stretched over the leprous rock and faded into space where the cliff fell away. Far below, like a ship in a bottle, the _Black Pearl_ lay in the centre of the harbour, wreckage all about her: the bright lanterns on her stern seemed impossibly small, like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Beyond the bay, along the eastern edge of the world, came a faint warm glow: the harbinger of sunrise.

"A long climb," said Sparrow, staring down at his ship. Jack wondered what would become of Sparrow, or of himself, should either of them fall. He imagined bones like white skittles, bouncing and tumbling down into the ocean, and wanted to shiver, but (deprived of anything that _could_ shiver) did not.

He reached out and drew Jack Sparrow back with him into the cave-mouth, out of the moonlight.

"D'you truly not remember?" he said.

"I do remember, Jack," said Sparrow, very quietly: and then, as though propelled by some theatrical mechanism, the two of them were angled towards one another, Sparrow's face -- its fleshly overlay regained -- tilted up to meet Jack's, and Jack's mouth seeking out Sparrow's as though, at last, it had learned to do this without conscious direction.

There was nothing wrong with the kiss, and yet there was nothing _right_. Jack Sparrow's hands were holding him close, pressing against his waist and his left shoulder: Jack Sparrow's wicked agile tongue (Jack could remember a great deal of what that tongue had _done_ , though without the context of how it had _felt_ ) was winding around Jack's own: their lips were moving against one another in some sort of silent conversation, independent of their minds: and, far down in Jack's spine, something coiled hotly, though it did not emerge from whatever dream it dreamt.

It was a pleasant sensation, or at any rate not unpleasant: and Jack wanted to rage and tear at the world -- at _Ragetti_ , in truth -- for taking from him something that had been a thousand times greater than mere pleasance.

Jack Sparrow, in his arms, was trembling, and it took Jack a moment to understand that this was rage to match his own.

"Oh, Christ, Jack," he said, pulling Sparrow closer; and Sparrow's hands (best not think about their coldness, or the bone so lately revealed beneath the calluses and the muscle) tightened convulsively.

"I remember what it was, to want you," Sparrow said. "Christ, Jack, I'm sorry --"

"What? For what?"

"For not knowing --"

" _I_ knew it, and I took the gold."

"Then you're a fool."

"No I'm not," said Jack, more out of habit than anything. Then, "Or maybe I am: but only for you."

He kissed Sparrow again, trying to turn his anger into something else: and perhaps it was working, for Sparrow was melting against him now, and his clever hands were working their way under Jack's coat, under his shirt, onto his own nerveless skin. He did not feel Sparrow's touch, not in any ordinary way: but the knowledge of it, and of whose touch it was, brought the sinuous fiery thing at the base of his spine closer to wakefulness.

"D'you think we can?" said Sparrow thickly, breaking the kiss, looking up at him with that blank black gaze that -- was Jack imagining it? -- had more wickedness in it now.

"I think," began Jack: and then stopped, belatedly, because he was _not_ thinking, though thought was not lost to him in the way that sensation seemed to be.

Jack Sparrow stared up at him for a moment, face like a carnival mask, quite unreadable; and his hands did not stop their strange -- because unfamiliar -- caresses. He was leaning against, pressing against, Jack Shaftoe, and Jack could feel both their bodies beginning to respond and awaken to one another's touches. It was still strange, though, as though he were watching two quite other people kiss and touch and embrace, watching them stare at one another as though this were a new adventure about which neither party was wholly sure.

Sparrow's cold hand, unfastening the buttons on his breeches; Sparrow's mouth, surely less icy than a moment ago, fastening on the hollow of Jack's throat; Sparrow's own hard prick, pressing against the heel of Jack's hand as he reached down between them... Jack groaned, and leaned his forehead against Jack Sparrow's, and knew that he had been right to make this new leap, to follow Sparrow into the unknown: not because this, this _fucking_ , or love-making, or whatever-it-was, was working, but because it was _not_ : because, knowing it futile for himself, neither of them would cry quits for fear of depriving the other.

Oh, the emptiness of Sparrow's agile hand (don't think, Jack, don't think about the bones) on him, the unfeel of it, the way that Jack could anyway stand here, slumped against Jack Sparrow, pushing into that hand, all sorely, numbly unfulfilled, and want it anyway because that hand was his lover's hand.

( _Lover? Lover?_ squeaked a small voice from somewhere. _Aye, then 'tis Love!_ )

"No, Jack," said Jack Shaftoe after, oh, just a moment more of that cool hand on him. "It's no use for me, and I'll wager not for you neither: do this --" He squeezed, gently, and Sparrow undulated against him. "-- as long as we like, long as we _live_ , it'll never be enough."

"I remember," said Jack Sparrow tremulously, hand stilling, "Christ, Jack, I remember your hand when it was too much."

Jack dropped his forehead to Sparrow's shoulder. He could hear the pirate's rigorously steady breathing -- surely wasted effort -- next to his ear. "Jack, I --"

"We'll have that again," said Jack Sparrow, disentangling himself and stepping back, so that Jack perforce must raise his head. There was much more light in this rocky antechamber now, and Sparrow's skin seemed like gilded flesh again, and not some painted papier-mâché: and his eyes were no longer quite empty.

"Aye," said Jack, tidying his person, distantly amazed at how easily he'd slipped from that shivery embrace to this supremely pragmatic stance. "Let's seek out Ragetti and have back our lives."

"Our deaths," Sparrow reminded him: and smiled with something more like good humour than Jack had seen since, oh, since the beach so far below and behind them, and the coins he'd offered to Jack Sparrow for a single kiss.

Jack leant forward and kissed Sparrow again, because he could, because he had wanted to so very much last night, because however far away it felt, it was far closer than anything else now: and Jack Sparrow kissed him back.

* * *

The maps had not lied: there was a path leading down from that high rocky ledge, down across a slope as steep as a roof and into a tangled green jungle. It was a young jungle -- most of the trees were no more than twice Jack's height, and the undergrowth not yet irremediably tangled into a single voracious mass -- and it came awake around the two of them as they walked. Jack Sparrow, ever looking for the workable angle of any situation, relished the slight weariness he felt, only a distant echo of the usual exhaustion that would've possessed him after a day's storm-driven sailing and a night ... a night like this.

Beside him strode Jack Shaftoe, handsome capable violent _immortal_ Jack Shaftoe, and for a moment Jack wondered if it would really be so very dreadful to endure this state, year after year, in such company. Jack Shaftoe by daylight was handsome; Jack Shaftoe by moonlight a phantastickal moving sculpture of long, elegant lines and flowing grace, all death's-head grin and constant motion. With Shaftoe at his side, and his mortality stolen from him by some light-fingered heathen deity (not to mention that leprous toe-rag Ragetti), what might he not achieve?

"What's put you in so fine a mood?" said Shaftoe.

Jack realised that he was smiling. "It's a fine morning," he said. It _was_ , though that was not enough to make him smile, any more: but in truth his mood was none too good. It was the being on land, he told himself, that didn't agree with him. Nothing to do, nothing at all to do, with the edge gone from everything he saw and heard and smelt and felt. The sun, hauling itself up from the eastern ocean like a ripe orange bobbing up from a bucket, seemed dim, but perhaps it was veiled by early mist, or by the smoke from some distant fire. The lush green growth around them -- through which someone had hacked a path with a cutlass or machete, recently enough that the sap still glistened on the severed stalks -- did not smell _near_ to him.

"We'll come on him soon," said Shaftoe, quite unperturbed by his environment -- though Jack noticed that he was continually turning his head, looking around, seeking any sign that would indicate peril or prey: that would indicate Ragetti. The hack-marks were signature enough, but even Ragetti might have the cunning of a cornered beast: he could ambush them, or circle round and watch them follow a cold trail. And Jack had had enough, already, of cold things.

"Aye," he said. "And, though I'd dearly like to give him what he deserves, we must take him back alive."

"Why can't we just kill him?" said Shaftoe, glancing at Jack. In the morning light his eyes seemed a brighter blue, and his skin more nearly its usual hue. "Won't the curse lift?"

"We'll take him back to the cave," said Jack.

Shaftoe made a rude noise. "Why?"

"Because," said Jack, chin up, "I don't know, and neither do you, what those heathen gods might take it into their heads to do if his debt -- remember, Jack, the blood? -- isn't paid."

"I'll help him pay his debt," said Shaftoe. He had his cutlass out, bare blade silver-bright in the sunshine, and he flourished it before him: and, from somewhere ahead of them, came the sound of something large crashing through the greenery.

"That's him," said Shaftoe over his shoulder, breaking into a run.

Jack remembered Shaftoe scooping up gold: "Not without me!" He began to run too.

Ragetti must have seen the flash and glitter of Jack Shaftoe's sword, and known it for pursuit: but he had not had the wit, or the coolness, to leave the overgrown path, and Shaftoe caught up with him as he was scrabbling through a tangle of red-flowered vinery.

"You sure I can't kill him?" he demanded of Jack, Ragetti stretched between his two hands like a length of cloth being hawked by a weaver.

"Better not, eh?" said Jack, tilting his head back the better to glare at Ragetti from beneath the brim of his hat. "The heathen gods might find a use for him, though I can't imagine what it might be."

Shaftoe grinned, as though several unpleasant scenarios had sprung to mind. Ragetti squirmed and kicked, and Shaftoe forced him down to his knees.

"Think of it, mate," he said into his captive's ear. "They want your blood, they do."

"I never did nothing!" said Ragetti.  
  
"On the contrary, _mate_ ," said Jack, "you've done plenty lately. First of all you conspired with my old friend Barbossa, to murder me and take my ship."

"We wasn't going to --"

"Shut up," suggested Shaftoe, with a knee in the small of Ragetti's back. His cutlass, angled up so that Ragetti must lift his chin to avoid the point of it, was smeared with red.

"So," said Jack, "mutiny. And now this unauthorised venture of yours vis-à-vis old Cortez' treasure, dooming myself and Mr Shaftoe here to eternal purgatory, which we've found we don't especially care for: most uncivil of you, mate, considering that we were kind enough to bring you along in the first place."

Ragetti muttered something, but -- between Shaftoe's blade and the stretch of Ragetti's throat -- the only words that Jack could make out were 'Pintel' and 'bastard', and then a rather unpleasant scream as Jack Shaftoe adjusted his grip.

"Leave it, Mr Shaftoe," said Jack. "He's done nothing so very terrible."

"Has he not?" said Shaftoe, looking his captain right in the eye. "I'll beg to differ."

"What's he done, then?"

"I --" tried Ragetti.

"Shut up," said Jack, and Shaftoe too.

"He's taken something from me that I valued greatly," said Jack Shaftoe, "and I don't know that I'll ever regain it."

For a moment Jack did not understand. Then Shaftoe, still grasping Ragetti by the scruff of the neck, inclined his head toward Jack, as if to say, 'You': and a nameless wave of something warm, or warming, washed over Jack and lodged in some empty receptive place inside of him that might, once, have held his heart.

"Aye, Jack," he said. "And I know that loss. I do. But killing him won't help, and nor will tormenting him."

"Is that right?" said Jack Shaftoe, and there was something ugly in his voice.

"It is," said Jack. "Well, we already know he took the coin, eh?"

"Show it me," said Shaftoe against Ragetti's ear: and Ragetti, eyes blank and gummy, held out his hand, showing Jack two bright disks of gold.

"Ah," said Jack heavily. "Now, that's answered my only question, concerning what on earth possessed you to take the coin. Weren't just for yourself, eh? For your mate Pintel, him that Barbossa slew." He looked at Ragetti with all the sincerity he could muster, though -- with Shaftoe, armed and vindictive, restraining the man -- it did not really seem to matter whether Ragetti came willingly or not. He'd come.

Ragetti looked back at him, and said nothing.

"That won't bring him back," said Jack. "Nothing'll bring him back now. But that coin and a drop of your blood'll buy you your life from the heathen gods -- aye, and mine, and his."

"I ain't doing it," said Ragetti. "You can't --"

"I _can_ ," said Jack Shaftoe, plain and brittle as ice, and he moved the cutlass so that fresh blood sprung around the sharp tip of it. Jack watched, and remembered waking Ragetti just this way, back in that little fishing-village where he'd been seeking the _Orion_ : or, really, seeking Jack Shaftoe. Jack was surprised at how easy it was to look at Shaftoe and feel nothing: and not to mind that once it had been different.

"I _can_ make you, Ragetti," said Shaftoe, moving the cutlass away from Ragetti's throat. Ragetti, blood streaming down his neck and soaking his filthy grey shirt, drew a ragged breath, and then another.

"Come with us," said Jack, "and pay back your debt to the gold. And then, I swear, you're free to go."

"You'll kill me," said Ragetti: and Jack, turning to go, rounded on him and said, "Not _I_ , Ragetti: and it was not I who killed your friend. Let him up, Jack: let him walk. He's a debt to pay, in blood."

Shaftoe hauled Ragetti to his feet. "Then," he said, "I'll leave him the means of satisfying it. For now."


	11. Mortal Hazards, Chapter Eleven

  
  
"It ain't much I'm askin'," complained Ragetti again, and Jack kicked him: but his heart wasn't in it, and Ragetti barely flinched.

Jack didn't care. He had Ragetti's scrawny arm in a firm hold, and Ragetti -- after that first blood-frayed flurry of desperation -- had not attempted to escape. He was muttering about Pintel again, and the unfairness of it all; but Jack could not be bothered to listen, and Jack Sparrow, walking behind them both in the humid jungle-light, had been uncharacteristically reticent on the subject.

Strange to feel green earth beneath the thinning soles of his boots once more. Jack did not trust the land. Everything bad that had ever happened to him (thought Jack, wilfully forgetful of a multitude of watery incidents, including but not limited to drowning, flooding, sea-battles, attacks by pirates, worm-eaten timbers and encounters with His Majesty's Navy) had happened on land. Since he'd met Jack Sparrow, in particular, each landfall seemed to have precipitated some new disaster. There'd been that press-gang in Stabroek (easy, now, to forget the reason for his disorientation _then_ : Jack Sparrow, naked against him on a straw mattress in the hot attic room). He'd next set foot on solid (if marshy) ground in Morawhanna, where they'd encountered bloody Walter and his damned map, and Ragetti had eavesdropped outside the tavern, hearing too much to be safe, or not enough. And, most lately -- excepting of course this cursed Isle of Death -- there'd been Port O' Spain, where (though Jack, even in his current abstracted state, could not quite believe that this had happened) he had almost left Jack Sparrow for good.

Here he was, not a handful of hours since he'd snatched up that cursed coin, not even _feeling_ anything any longer for Sparrow: and yet he understood, now, that leaving ('running away,' supplied that nagging voice) had been the one of the most stupid things he'd done, in a life lived largely at the whim of Pox, Imp and Posterity (which latter deserved a good tale or two to tell).

He'd _meet_ Posterity, now, if things fell awry: and Jack found that he didn't relish the thought.

The path seemed steeper than it had when they'd plunged down in pursuit of Ragetti and the coins he'd thieved. It climbed steadily as they headed north, up the jungly spine of the Isla de Muerta, towards the gloomy tunnel that would lead them back down to the treasure-cave. Jack was (at least intellectually) relieved not to feel the effort of the climb, or the fatigue of a day and a night without sleep. He wondered what he might be capable of, now that he was -- whatever he was. He and Jack Sparrow, roaming the terraqueous globe, invincible and infinitely patient...

"Still there," said Jack Sparrow from behind him, and Jack blinked. They had achieved that precarious ledge once more, with its view down into the hidden harbour where the _Black Pearl_ lay. Jack suddenly longed to be back on the ship, back where life was divided simply into day and night, sea and sky; back where he had been alive.

He had stood here earlier, at dawn, with Sparrow, looking down at the dark silhouette of the ship against the lightening waters: and suddenly Jack Shaftoe was afraid, for even that seemed long ago and far away, as though it had happened to someone else.

"Jack," he said, and _something_ , some last forlorn scrap of feeling, must have resounded in his words, for Jack Sparrow turned quickly, as though Jack had cried out for succour rather than simply saying his name.

"Jack," said Jack Sparrow, gazing at him. "I --"

"Ah," said Ragetti, still quiescent in Jack's grip. " _I_ see what you've been up to, the two of you."

Jack could feel rage surging through him, rage and a sharp desire to hurl Ragetti from the cliff and see how well he'd survive the journey down. But Jack Sparrow was still looking at him, and somehow the rage went right through him without touching him at all, even when he made himself remember that this man -- Ragetti, now bestowing an ugly, over-familiar smile upon them both -- had taken it all away.

"What's it to you?" he said: and, despite the lack of passion that he felt, Ragetti looked away and mumbled something.

Behind them, the opening of the tunnel was like a gash of blacker night in the black rock. Jack phant'sied that he could hear the screams of the damned, or the calls of the dead: but then he remembered that, of all the _Black Pearl_ 's company, the three of them here in the light were most nearly ghosts. Most likely what he heard was the crowing of the _Pearl_ 's uncursed crew, counting out safe Spanish gold for one another.

"Say what you like," said Jack Sparrow to Ragetti, stepping close so that the other man flinched from him. "You'll have nothing from us until the curse is lifted."

Jack grinned, for that was as fine a threat as ever he'd heard.

"Captain Sparrow, I find myself somewhat occupied." He gestured at Ragetti with his free hand, and Ragetti growled like a mad dog. "Will you see to the torch?"

Sparrow plucked the torch from the sand where Jack'd thrust it earlier. He stripped off that portion of the cloth that was burnt and blackened, and cast it aside: the wind caught it and carried it over the edge of the cliff. Jack watched it idly: and when he turned back, Sparrow had taken out his pistol, removed the ball, and sparked it unhurriedly until the oily cloth caught.

"Into the underworld, gentlemen," he said, tucking the unloaded pistol back into his sash. And, over his shoulder as he went, "I promise I won't look back, Jack."

* * *

The tunnel down to the sea-cave was twisty and dark and as convoluted as Jack Sparrow's thoughts: but, today, those thoughts seemed very clear and remote, and did not distract him at all from the business at hand. He knew what was missing, could still feel the ache of it: felt it worse each time he looked at Jack Shaftoe, and knew it still for only an echo of what he should be feeling.

And what if the curse wouldn't lift? What if Jack Shaftoe, after all, was set on that wild goose chase for the Fountain of Youth? Jack chuckled to himself: considering how _this_ 'd turned out, any prudent gentleman would think twice about embarking on some new adventure.

Yet Jack Shaftoe, it had to be said, did not necessarily number prudence amongst his (to Jack, numerous) virtues.

"Jack!" he called over his shoulder: he'd promised -- half-joking, remembering that Greek bloke -- not to turn around, but now he found himself actually _reluctant_ to do so, just in case ... And anyway the looming brooding darkness, the sheer weight of the island all around them, was enough to make any man respectful of whatever powers held sway here.

"Aye?" said Jack Shaftoe's disembodied voice out of the darkness behind him. "Can you hold the light a bit higher, eh? Can't see a bloody thing."

"There's nothing to see," said Jack, raising the light regardless. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw something move, something sharp-toothed and predatory: but when he glanced that way, he saw only blank rock.

"There's something behind us," said Ragetti; there was a scuffling noise, and Shaftoe cursed.

"Why should anybody be following us, eh?" said Jack, trying to listen for sounds of pursuit. Was that a footfall?

"Don't be daft," said Shaftoe: and then he was reaching forward, twisting the torch from Jack's hand, holding it high so that -- Jack could not help but look back -- the flickering, smoky light made them all into pointy-faced devils.

"Nothing there," declared Shaftoe, brandishing the torch fearsomely. It guttered, and he quickly passed it back to Jack. "Let's get on with it, shall we?"

"Aye," said Jack, wanting to scan the darkness behind them, but very much aware of Shaftoe's gaze upon him, and Shaftoe's sharp tongue ready to mock. Besides, the torch was dying, and he didn't care to be stuck in this tunnel, however straight and branchless, without a light.

It seemed a year before he saw flickering light ahead of them, so faint at first that he imagined it some reflection of their faltering torch: and then he found his pace quickening. Shaftoe swore at him (though not very vehemently), and Ragetti made a feeble, protesting sound at something Shaftoe'd done.

And then they were out in the cave, still glittery here and there with random gold strewn on the shingle. Jack leaned down and scooped up a coin, and tossed it in the air. "Seems it's up to your captain, gentlemen, to do all the plundering around here," he called.

There was only one boat left, Jack noticed: almost everyone must've gone back to the _Pearl_. Another mutiny? No, for Bill Turner was here, beaming at him -- then sparing a scowl for Ragetti, still manacled in Jack Shaftoe's unyielding grip.

"No one else stupid enough to play around with Cortez' little bag of tricks, eh?" Jack said to Bill.

"No, Captain," said Bill, grinning. "No trouble, then?"

"No trouble," said Jack. A few of the men -- Stone, Fletcher, Turnbull -- were lounging around on the shingle, picking it over like fishwives picking clean a bank of mussels. There was a substantial harvest of coinage next to Bill, laid out in neat piles.

"Are we waiting for something?" enquired Jack Shaftoe. "Is this not audience enough?"

"I want --" said Ragetti, and Shaftoe leaned over and murmured something that made his skin go patchily pale.

"Never mind," said Shaftoe, waving. "Carry on. Nothing important."

Jack plucked a coin from the chest -- for surely he could not be cursed anew -- and held it up so that it refracted moonlight into the far corners of the cave. Stone flinched when the little roundel of light slid over his arm, and Jack grinned: Stone flinched more, and Jack looked away. He tossed the coin (heads), thinking about forever: then cast it back.

"Mr Shaftoe," he said, "do you want to do the honours for our friend here?"

Shaftoe grinned, or rather bared his teeth, and Jack could not help but step back: then laughed at himself, mirthlessly, and Jack Shaftoe laughed too.

"Perhaps I’d better take care of it," he said.

Someone had brought more torches from the _Pearl_ , or improvised them from cast-off shirts and other rags to hand: the cavern was lit as well as it had been at midnight, though now it was near noon in the world outside. Sunlight streamed down through that same deep shaft that'd funnelled the merciless moonlight onto the two of them, Shaftoe and Sparrow, as they took the coins and brought Cortez' curse upon themselves.

Those of the crew who'd stayed in the cave gathered around once more, gawking curiously at their captain, and his particular friend, and their former crewmate Ragetti who'd had his second chance after the mutiny, and had blown it so very, spectacularly, badly. Jack wouldn't have bet a clipped penny on Ragetti's chances of surviving a voyage of any length.

Ragetti was hanging back, looking about him for a way to run: but the men were pressed shoulder to shoulder, a living prison, and none of them were smiling.

"Come on, mate," said Jack. "I swear it won't hurt: unless, of course, you've got a few more coins stashed away, in which case it most certainly will hurt, for I'll let Mr Shaftoe do as he pleases with you."

Shaftoe grinned, which made Jack smile in return. He reached for Ragetti's hand and tugged him closer. "Come _on_ ... You do have the coins, Mr Ragetti? Good. Just hold still, and --"

Jack slashed across Ragetti's palm, knife-blade chiming against the coins, and Ragetti howled as blood welled thickly from the wound. Jack cast the dagger aside (dimly aware of Shaftoe moving to pick it up) and wrapped his hand around Ragetti's, and _squeezed_ until his own hand hurt, until Ragetti began to protest: until the blood was well and truly paid.

Then he let go, and stepped back, and said, "Pay the debt."

Ragetti looked at him blankly; and Jack, dredging up the old words from his reading (long ago and far away, before last night), said, "Begun by blood: by blood undone."

And, so slow that Jack could've screamed, Ragetti was stepping forward, leaning over the chest, dropping one coin, watching it fall, dropping the other. They sent up as many echoes as though the chest, and the watching men, and the shaft of dusty sunlight were all somehow in a cathedral, a belfry, a place of resounding worship.

Jack waited, and was afraid to look at Shaftoe.

* * *

Paid in full.

Jack's life rushed back over him, ten times as vivid and shocking and vital as before; as though, before, he'd been only half-alive. _This_ was life, ever so much brighter and hotter and louder than he remembered.

"...Jack?"

Oh, and these his crewmates, watching nervous as mice; there, slumped listless in a widening circle of isolation, Ragetti, bleeding anew from where Jack'd cut him: and _there_ , blazing beacon of this same fire that burnt in Jack's veins ... there was Jack Sparrow, smiling at him in a way that told Jack that he was not the only keeper of this new secret knowledge of Life.

A plethora of sensations, real and remembered and imagined, broke over Jack Shaftoe: and out of them, heart pounding, he could not help but say, "Captain, come with me: I've something to show you."

He caught up a fresh torch as he went, not wishing to negotiate that catacomb in the dark again, and the flame-shadows were like curtains or veils around the two of them, as though this were some holy ancient rite in a heathen temple. Jack laughed aloud at the thought.

"What's the joke?" said Jack Sparrow, but he was already laughing too.

Then -- though Jack's aching legs insisted that it had not really been as rapid or as easy as all that -- they were out in the sun again, and the noon heat was billowing over them as though someone had opened a baker's oven.

Jack Sparrow, all glitter and shade and curve, came out of the cave blinking, tilting his face up to the sun as though he'd been in some dark prison half his life. Jack looked at him and simply _wanted_ , and perhaps he made some inarticulate noise, for Sparrow's smile widened even before he opened his eyes and looked over at Jack.

"What was it you wanted to show me, Mr Shaftoe?" he enquired. "Maybe I've already seen it, eh?"

"Surely you've no objection to my refreshing your memory," said Jack nonchalantly, stepping closer, grinning fit to crack his face.

"Objection?" said Sparrow, all false innocence: but he was already reaching for Jack, pulling him closer, closer, close enough for kissing.

And then, oh heaven, like the reverse of taking Cortez' coin (for this kiss held coded in it the fierce sharp joy of life, and the fearsome shadow of death that made each moment of living blaze brighter while it could) he was kissing, being kissed by, Jack Sparrow. How very different to that dead embrace at dawn; how scaldingly salacious was the stale pungency of Sparrow's mouth, the delightful reek of his sweat (enough to make Jack _grateful_ for the steepness of their ascent, and the heat of the sun, that made their bodies work, and give off humours noxious and otherwise), the way that same sun drew auburn and aureate echoes from Sparrow's black hair, the curve of his throat, the sweeter flex of his spine under Jack's hand...

"I'll come if you touch me, Jack," Sparrow was saying, now that Jack's mouth was feeding greedily on his neck, "the _moment_ you touch me, but oh Christ please touch me, touch me now."

"Hot in all that, I expect," Jack wanted to say, but all he managed was "Hot," and a needy growl. Then he was pushing Jack Sparrow's musty, musky leather coat off his shoulders, and though the ledge was not wide, nor was it so narrow that he couldn't (stripping off Sparrow's shirt) be on his knees in front of Jack Sparrow, wrapping his arms around Sparrow's waist, pressing his face against Sparrow's belly, and then lower, breathing in the smell of him, feeling the leap and quiver and glow of Sparrow's prick, through the pirate's clothes, against his cheek. Above him Sparrow was inciting him breathlessly to all manner of filthy, glorious acts, each thought of which made Jack's own prick harden more. Then Sparrow was down next to him, face to face so that they could kiss again, and his hands were making heavy weather of the buttons on Jack's breeches, so that Jack (similarly engaged, and surely less practiced) won through first to his prize.

He got his arm around Jack Sparrow's shoulders, feeling the heat rushing out of every pore of his skin like a fever-victim's, and pulled him close. They were both moaning into the kiss, and Sparrow's cock was so full that Jack, wanting to put his mouth to it, knew that there was no time, now, for elaboration or finesse. He wrapped his hand around it -- just as Sparrow's hand was stroking him, hard and rough and unbelievably immediate -- and felt Jack Sparrow's sharp teeth, all gold and white, against his lip, hard enough to draw blood: and the taste of his own blood, the feel of Sparrow beginning to come over his hand, the broken cry as he bit Sparrow back, all were as intrinsic to life as the hammering of his heart.

* * *

He could taste blood on Jack Shaftoe's mouth, and when he brought up his hand to wipe it away he could taste Shaftoe's seed too. He lapped and sucked at it, enjoying the feel of his own tongue on his own skin near as much as the strong, salty taste of Jack Shaftoe.

Shaftoe, leaning against him, stirred, and grinned, and, letting go of Jack's softening prick, raised his own viscid hand and began to lick it clean. The sight was almost enough to make Jack harden again, and he could feel little flurries of arousal up and down the core of his spine: but Jack preferred to postpone his -- their – subsequent satisfactions, for the sweet anguish of anticipation was already making his nerves sing, and he looked forward to that smouldery song becoming a raging conflagration of need, to be deliciously, repeatedly, comprehensively assuaged.

"You reckon it worked, then?" said Jack Shaftoe, grinning at him between long slow licks of Jack's seed.

Jack raised his eyebrows. "Difficult to say, really."

"P'rhaps we ought to have another try, then," said Shaftoe, reaching for him: and Jack wriggled back and stood up (catching the waist of his breeches with one hand as they threatened to drop around his ankles), laughing at Shaftoe's scowl.

"Later, Jack, I promise you. Later, we'll make absolutely, positively sure that everything's working just as it ought. Now ..." He held out his hand (still slightly sticky, it must be said) and pulled Shaftoe upright. "Did you really have something you wanted to show me, Jack? Or was it merely a ploy to have me to yourself?"

"Haven't had you lately," said Shaftoe, looking him up and down approvingly. "Later, you said, eh? Righto ... Actually, Captain Sparrow, there _was_ something I wanted to show you."

Jack let himself be drawn to the very brink of the cliff. He stared down at his precious ship, anchored in clear water with sinuous black sharks circling beneath her, and a jolly-boat in a froth of white water, setting off for the shore...

"The _Black Pearl_ ," he said.

"You told me once," said Jack Shaftoe, "that only by moonlight could a man see that treasure for what it truly was. And you thought, and I thought too, that there meant some trick to where it was hidden, or how it'd be found: but it wasn't like that at all."

Shaftoe paused, and Jack felt his hand tighten, where it still held Jack's own.

"But the moonlight did show me treasure, Jack." Shaftoe waved a hand down at the bay, the _Pearl_ , the ocean wide and blue. "Showed me what I'd lost -- or so it seemed to me then: showed me you."

Jack opened his mouth to speak, but nothing emerged.

"Showed me you, Jack Sparrow, who're more worth seeking than anything I've ever heard of, anything --"

"I'm here," said Jack, laying his hand across Jack Shaftoe's hot, wet, tender mouth; following it with a kiss. "What'll you seek now, Jack?" he murmured.

Jack Shaftoe chuckled, and shrugged, and kissed him back.


	12. Mortal Hazards, Chapter Twelve

  
  
Chapter Twelve

After the last day of the journey here, and a night such as the night the two of them had just passed -- into Death's country, and out of it again -- and the rushing and running and climbing and chasing; after all that, Jack Shaftoe was of the opinion that sleep was his prerogative, his and Sparrow's, and that they might doze off there in the sun, arms around one another, secure in the certainty of waking to each other's presence. He could not, even now, imagine a finer way to wake.

But no, 'twas not to be: far below, from the sea, came the sound of a single gun; and Jack Sparrow, as though himself impelled from some cannon, leapt to his feet and rushed to the edge of the cliff with such alacrity that Jack feared for his equilibrium.

But he was grinning when he looked back over his shoulder at Jack. "'Tis only Bill, letting us know that he's keen to get going," he said.

"Nice of him not to come and round us up," said Jack, with a sly grin, stretching himself out in the sun for Sparrow's delectation. Oh, the heat in Jack Sparrow's gaze: how could he have lived without that, even for half a night?

He hadn't been alive.

Sparrow was looking at him hungrily, but he stayed standing, and scooped up his shirt from the ground.

"Time to go, Jack," he said. "They'll've loaded up everything they found."

"What of that ... Aztec gold?" Jack asked, frowning. He sat up straighter, pulling his own shirt back onto his shoulders. "Surely it'd fetch a fine price from some bloke like Walter, or that Doctor who they had. A man who didn't care for life --"

"Ah, but Jack," said Jack Sparrow, donning his shirt, "imagine it in the wrong hands, eh?"

"The wrong hands? That's what old Walter said about you," said Jack, chuckling. "Wonder how far he's got?"

"Think, Jack," insisted Sparrow. "What about your mates in the Regiment, eh, forced to take, not the King's Shilling, but the King's Bloody Cursed Coin? Forced to fight forever because they couldn't be slain? Think of that. Think of some poor Neeger on a sugar plantation, never getting a square meal because he isn't about to drop dead of starvation, or overwork, or being beaten bloody by some pinch-mouthed sot of a supervisor. Think --"

"I _am_ thinking," interrupted Jack, gesturing towards the tunnel-mouth. "Light the torch, eh?"

Sparrow did the trick with his pistol-flint and the oily cloth again. "Won't last long," he remarked, eyeing Jack's tattered shirt speculatively.

"No oil, mate," said Jack brightly, leering.

"Well, Mr Shaftoe, that's an omission that we'll have to rectify," said Jack Sparrow, with a lascivious wink. The simple heat in his eyes woke an answering flush all through Jack Shaftoe's skin: a flush that Sparrow, he noted, smiled to see.

Their descent this time was hastier than before, for neither was keen to be left in the dark if -- when -- their light failed. Sparrow did not speak, but hurried down the rocky passageway, holding the flaming guttering torch high, and Jack followed him, thinking about gold.

The torch-flame was writhing and popping, almost dead, by the time they reached the dogleg where the slope gentled: and as they came round the corner, they were met by a welcome steady light, a light that came from a lantern held high in Bill Turner's hand.

"Wondered if you'd enough light to come down by," he greeted them. Jack thought that Bill's gaze lingered a little longer upon himself, as though Bill expected to see something, and did not see it at once: but whether it (whatever 'it' might be) was there for Bill to see at all, he did not know.

"We've left the beach clean," said Bill. "And there were a few bits and pieces lying around, Spanish gear mostly; we put that on board for safe-keeping. But we left _that_ \--" jerking his head at the carven chest "-- for you to dispose of."

"Thank you, Mr Turner," said Jack Sparrow. And to Jack himself, "Well?"

"What?"

"D'you want that gold, and all that it can do?"

The question was a kind of test, and it provoked the most unexpected reactions in Jack Shaftoe's mind. The correct answer, he knew, was "No": but, of old, Jack'd have said "Yes" for the hell of it. And if he had not, the Imp of the Perverse would've squeaked and gibbered and tempted him with all the entertaining consequences ensuant on that wrong answer. It seemed an age since Jack Shaftoe had heard the Imp's dulcet tones, or felt its needly claws in him: and now, returned from wherever it'd fled when the curse took hold, its clam'rous entreaties were oddly in accord with Jack's own heart.

"Sink it deep, Captain Sparrow," he said at once, no more than very distantly amazed at the opportunities for fraud and chicanery which'd be sunk along with the gold. "Sink it where it won't be found."

"You don't _want_ to peddle eternal life?" enquired Jack Sparrow, delicate as a cat.

Jack looked him in the eye, and said, "I won't sell eternal death, Jack: but I'm flattered that you think I could _lie_ so well."

"I haven't lied to you, Jack," said Sparrow, low and urgent.

Jack set his hand (could he have done this yesterday, in front of Bill, and the men on the beach?) on Sparrow's face, and felt Sparrow press briefly and infinitesimally into the caress. "I know it," he murmured. "We made that gamble together."

"Aye, and I --" began Jack Sparrow very softly: and then he drew back, and turned to Bill. "Mr Turner, get that chest into the boat, if you can: I don't care to leave it lying around for any power-crazed buccaneer to find."

"But you said --"

"We'll sink it," said Jack Sparrow, "full fathom five."

* * *

Jack had some business that needed all his time and effort and concentration, some very important business: but there was another matter vying for his immediate attention, and _that_ , at least, must be dealt with in public, before all the company. And, too, this damned trap of a harbour from which to extract his ship; and the cursed gold to sink safely beneath the waves; and all manner of matters between him and what mattered most.

He swore, and scowled, and snapped out orders: sweeps out, topsails up, warp round the _Pearl_ until her bow pointed due east, to the open ocean. Jack Shaftoe was there beside him, ready to brace the helm if need be -- ready, Jack knew, for whatever Jack asked of him -- but Jack did not let himself look, for fear of forgetting to return his gaze to the wheel, and the compass, and the way ahead. The sun had fallen behind the crest, and the ship crept forward in a penumbral gloom, the water clear and solid before her and breaking reluctantly, like a thick jelly, around her prow.

Seabirds screamed around them as the _Black Pearl_ slid silently through that narrow black defile. Jack felt he'd lived an age since they had first entered this harbour, though in truth 'twas only a day; and he had won back all he'd lost, and maybe more.

At last the _Pearl_ 's gilded stern emerged into the sunlight, and there was a cheer from the oar-deck, and the clatter of oars being drawn home.

"Bring me Ragetti," Jack Sparrow said to Bill, once the oarsmen had come up, and the topmen down, to the open deck. The _Black Pearl_ had come round into the wind, and the mainsail was stiffening. "South, for now," said Jack to Joe Turk, who had come up to take the wheel.

Ragetti was produced. He had always looked sullen, and now looked worse. Was that a fresh bruise decorating his cheekbone? Jack profoundly hoped so.

He put on his tricorne, threw his head back and glared at the last of the mutineers.

"You, mate, are off my ship, off the _Black Pearl_ , soon as we dock. Is that clear?"

"Aye," mumbled Ragetti, head down, doing his best not to meet any of the hostile looks from the men who would shortly be his former crewmates.

"Pintel isn't coming back," said Jack more kindly, trying to catch Ragetti's wandering gaze. "But you know where he's buried, eh? Then take your Spanish gold and buy your mate a grave-marker: lay him to rest as he'd have wanted, eh?"

Ragetti gave him a pinch-faced nod.

"And you lot," added Jack, moved by some mysterious philanthropic urge (or perhaps simply by the desire for an uninterrupted night), "you'll leave him be 'til then, savvy?"

A couple of dirty looks, but nothing to worry about: and in truth they were an even-tempered bunch, with fresh Spanish gold in their pockets and plans, already, on how best to lose it.

"I've a farewell gift for him," announced Jack Shaftoe suddenly, from beside Jack. Jack's heart sank, for he recalled the casual brutality of the morning, and knew truer than any how much Shaftoe had to resent, and to repay.

"'Tis a map," added Shaftoe.

Jack gaped at him, not quite daring to put it in words: so you're staying? So you don't desire eternal youth or fabulous wealth? So ...?

The crew were murmuring amongst themselves, but it all sounded amiable enough, and Bill and Joe (who knew what had been mapped, and by whom) were grinning broadly at Shaftoe, as though he'd passed a test.

"Mr Shaftoe and I," Jack proclaimed, "will be discussing his role upon this fine vessel, and then taking a well-earned rest. I trust, gentlemen, that you're capable of managing the _Pearl_ \-- or should I say letting her manage you -- until tomorrow morning?"

"I reckon I know what his role is!" called out someone -- Tom Cox? Yes, for Shaftoe was giving him the finger, and a broad grin, in a way that he probably wouldn't with some of the other hands -- and there was a general, cheerful rush of laughter. Jack soaked up salt air, and heat, and the creak of the rigging, and the slow boom of wreckage working against the rocks, and the cry of terns: and then, with a gesture to Jack Shaftoe that was curt only because it might otherwise become an embrace, he turned on his heel and headed for the stairs that led below.

"Oh," said Jack, halting so abruptly that Shaftoe ran up against him. " _That_." He gestured at the Aztec chest.

"What about it, Captain?" said Joe Turk, eyeing it uneasily, as though at any moment the lid'd fly off and let free what lurked within. The thought of that ancient gold, brooding somehow -- or perhaps that was the heathen gods, lurking and listening, waiting for some poor fool to take the bait and enter into that half-life once more ...

"Over the side with it," said Jack Sparrow, and watched as -- heaving and grunting and as careful as if it were made of glass -- Joe, and Turnbull, and Stone heaved the chest unceremoniously up onto the rail. They paused a moment, perhaps waiting for Jack to speak; but Jack just waved a hand impatiently, and the three of them let the heavy stone coffer drop into the dark waves. Jack did not linger to see the circle of white water dissolve.

Their cabin (his cabin?) was gloomy and full of shadows, with the _Black Pearl_ still in the dusky lee of the Isle de Muerta. Jack latched the door, and lit the hanging lamp above the bed, all the while aware of Jack Shaftoe's exact position, and stance, and the rate of his heart and his breath.

"Right, Mr Shaftoe," he said at last, straightening and turning to face Shaftoe. Hard to stand here without touching, yet touching would unravel him before he'd said what needed saying.

Shaftoe stood there, shoulders against the door, back straight, eyes very blue in the dim golden light, regarding him steadily. _That_ was almost enough to unravel Jack: that, and the hope of what might come from all this. The way that Shaftoe was looking at him was cause enough for hope.

"Let's get this straight," said Jack, striving for solemnity. "You're not on my crew, Mr Shaftoe: is that understood?"

If he'd hoped to provoke Jack Shaftoe -- and it was, Jack had to admit to himself, always amusing to rile him -- then he'd missed his mark, for Shaftoe's contrary frown was tempered with mischief to match Jack's own.

"Then what am I, _Captain_?" said Shaftoe, opening his eyes very wide in the vain hope, perhaps, of pretending innocence.

_Mine_ , Jack wanted to say; but not now, not yet. "You're free," he said.

Shaftoe looked taken aback by that, and Jack could feel a broader smile catching at the corners of his mouth. "Free to go?" he said at last.

"Will you come back?" said Jack, almost before Shaftoe had stopped speaking: too fast, too fast, but too much here to lose.

"I will, Jack, to you." And then, with that irrepressible smile, "Now, will you come _here_?"

* * *

Jack _ached_ , positively ached, for the feel of Jack Sparrow's skin against his own, naked and golden and hot: and yet when they were lying naked, pressed against one another, Sparrow's leg thrown over Jack's hip and his hand rolling their two cocks, one against the other, like a charlatan practising some sleight-of-hand, it was all Jack could do to breathe. He pressed his face against Sparrow's scarred shoulder, feeling the grind of the joint beneath the skin, and inhaled long and deep.

Sparrow was wriggling against him, though his hand was firm and sweet on Jack's cock: then there was a sensation of cold (which made Jack gasp, though sent more flashes of vitality through his body) and Sparrow saying, with laughter in his voice, "If we'd taken it with us it'd be warm."

"If we'd taken it with us, it'd've been torch-fuel," said Jack, sighing and pushing into Sparrow's oily hand. The heavy, green smell was not enough to cover the musk of Sparrow's sweat, or the sharp salt of their arousal. Had he ever been this alive, before old Cortez' curse? Not, for sure, in all those years preceding his fortuitous encounter with Jack Sparrow.

"So, Jack," murmured Sparrow, his fingers sliding over Jack's own now, slathering him with oil. "You've no use for eternal youth?" His voice cracked on that last word, for Jack's fingers were sliding into him, eager and vigorous.

"Nah," said Jack, pretending nonchalance -- not easy with Jack Sparrow's hand on him, lining him up as carefully as a artillery-man with his gun. "Has to be a lay, eh? We'd end up --"

"We?" managed Sparrow, staring at him with that black unfocussed gaze as Jack tilted his hips and _pushed_.

"Aye, Jack," said Jack Shaftoe huskily. "We; for I find you're excellent company, whatever ... oh Christ ... whatever. Whatever the occasion."

"So the moonlight ..."

But Jack, having had enough talk of treasure, and of things seen as they truly were, thrust up: and treasure indeed, the way that Jack Sparrow's words were transmuted to a deep, fervent groan. O, utterly definitively _alive_ to lie here, rocked by the _Black Pearl_ , deep within the body of her captain, who rocked back and impaled himself more firmly upon Jack's taut cock, the very epitome of wanton abandon, eyes closed in their smudged black orbits, mouth open, gasping Jack's name amidst exhortations and imprecations: harder, more, make me yours.

"As I'm yours," said Jack thickly, one hand on Jack Sparrow's hip to angle him just so, one hand pulling on Sparrow's own hot prick, at once delirious with the feel of Sparrow's body around him, and helplessly envious of Sparrow for being stretched and filled this way. "Oh, Jack, Jack, I want you in me..."

But then Jack could not speak, because Sparrow -- glorious, flexible, wicked Jack Sparrow -- was somehow contorting himself (groaning, and twisting against and around Jack's cock most intriguingly) and reaching around. Jack smelt fresh oil, and then oh Christ then Sparrow's practiced hand stroking oleaginously around his heavy balls; Jack brought his left knee up and, bracing himself, rocked his hips up from the bed, up into Jack Sparrow, who moaned louder than ever, but there were his fingers -- two abrupt fingers -- pushing against Jack, _into_ him, and though it was sudden and unexpected it was so very welcome that Jack pushed back against them, onto them, feeling himself penetrated and opened even as he thrust hard up into the furnace-heat above and around him.

"Jack," he said thickly, and realised that his eyes were open and that Jack Sparrow was staring at him, not blinking, eyes wide and black and full of, oh, so much that Jack wanted to learn: that Sparrow was broaching him with three fingers now, and the stretch and the pressure felt wrong until he remembered that his hand -- still busy with its independent rhythm -- was busy on Jack Sparrow's cock, and that only anatomy (and, he had to admit, impatience) was preventing him from being stretched and pressed by _that_. And there were worse alternatives than being balls-deep in Jack Sparrow's marvellous, slick, muscular body, trying to get deeper and evoking a low, passionate cry from Sparrow with each thrust, while Sparrow's cock, slick with that salty fluid (Jack wanted to taste it) that oozed clear from the tip, thrust into his welcoming hand, and Sparrow's own hand stood duty for his cock, fucking Jack's arse hard and steady, scissoring his fingers until Jack choked on his own breath and tried to push down harder onto Sparrow's hand: but that brought a yelped protest from Jack Sparrow, who claimed that his wrist was only flesh and bone. Instead, Jack braced himself (one foot on the floor, one on the bed beside Jack Sparrow's knee) and arched up against Sparrow, tilting his head down so that he could watch Sparrow, and then craning more to see where they joined: and then he looked back up, looked Jack Sparrow in the eye and said, "Come for me, love: one taste, and I'll..."

That was sufficient, more than sufficient, to send Sparrow through that last wave. His fingers stilled, his body tightened, and Jack loosened his hand to catch Sparrow's seed as it came, and came, in hot gouts over his skin. Sparrow was gasping, saying Jack's name, saying something about love; but he was not in any state to be coherent, and anyway Jack (hand once more to his lips, tasting Jack Sparrow, even as the last of Sparrow's climax pulsed forth onto his torso) was coming too, arse spasming around Sparrow's languidly-twitching fingers, cock trying to push even further into Sparrow's body, biting on his own warmly sticky hand to stifle a howl that might yet become a scream.

They eased themselves gingerly out from one another, kissing all soft and gentle, and Jack Sparrow leaned his forehead against Jack's, staring into his eyes, and said nothing.

* * *

Jack only gradually became aware that the cabin was full of liquid golden light -- as though the two of them were suspended in some thick honey'd syrup, or in a glass of fine Spanish wine. Shaftoe lay sprawled across the bunk, eyes closed; dreaming, perhaps, for his eyelids twitched with movement.

For a moment Jack was terrified by the fragility of it all. Jack Shaftoe, lying there in Jack's bed, drowsing in the last of the sunshine, with their clasped hands resting on the lean muscle of his belly, seemed to Jack as delicate and vulnerable as glass: a sentiment which, Jack felt sure, would be greeted with extravagant mockery were Jack to confess it. And yet, and yet: Jack Shaftoe, who seemed set to be a large part of Jack's own happiness for a while yet, was mortal. Jack Shaftoe might be slain, or maimed; the Pox might gallop up on him; a Navy sword, or Davies' cooking, or some clear fresh water from a beach-head spring ...

Jack Shaftoe's eyes opened, and Jack leaned back a little, in case his thoughts might show.

"El Dorado," said Shaftoe, beaming at him, that utterly happy, oddly innocent smile of his.

"Eh?" said Jack intelligently.

"El Dorado," repeated Shaftoe, running possessive greedy hands over those parts of Jack's anatomy most readily available, and smiling all the more. "The Golden One, ain't it?"

"Oh yes," said Jack, rolling his eyes. "Walter's little stories about the Fountain of Youth, and all that antique gold, and the like. Going to ask for your map back, eh? I'll put money --"

"Ssssh," said Shaftoe peaceably, laying a salty, oily, jungle-scented finger across Jack's lips. "You, Jack: you're that golden one; look at yourself, look ..."

"I can't," said Jack thickly, with Shaftoe's mouth luscious on his throat. "I'm looking at you."

"I remember," said Shaftoe at last, raising his head just enough to look Jack in the eye. "I was dreaming -- not just now, a long time ago -- that I was with you, and there was gold all around, and I never cared."

"Oh, Mr Shaftoe," said Jack, grinning, "so now I've turned you mad?"

"Aye," said Shaftoe, chuckling, and bit hard enough to make Jack yelp. "But I'm in fine company."

"Mad, and mortal," said Jack, drawing Shaftoe up until they were face to face once more. "But, Jack, I promise they'll remember us when we're gone."

"I ain't waiting that long," said Shaftoe, grinning, and kissed Jack slow and hot. His wide blue gaze was sparking with wickedness, or mischief, or perhaps just the last gold light of the sun, and he pressed against Jack, skin to skin, so that Jack could feel Shaftoe's heart beating, strong and steady and valiant, in time with his own. "We'll have 'em spin tales of every venture, Jack, of every voyage, of every treasure we find and curse we break and --"

"The rest of our days," said dazed Jack Sparrow, senses full of Shaftoe. "The rest of our lives."

\- end -


End file.
